On Running
The World Cup is more than halfway through. If you stay up late every night to watch, your body will inevitably reach a breaking point. Staying up late hurts the body—an eternal truth—and all the more so for the “three highs” crowd, who usually pay little attention to their health and lack exercise. So on days without matches, getting a good night’s sleep, exercising more, and staying fit is a splendid idea.
My systematic fitness regimen began in February or March of this year, almost in sync with my publishing articles on WeChat. With a new “job” suddenly occupying my spare time, the pressure spiked, and I felt my body could no longer cope. On top of that, in the year or so since I returned to Juniper, my weight had been climbing steadily, eventually shooting up to 162 jin (about 81 kg); a little more and I would become a fully certified specimen of the “short, rustic, and round” type in every dimension. So, in the Ah Q spirit of “no zuo no die,” I started my treadmill career at Qingniao near the office.
Running is probably one of the less effective ways to burn fat among all forms of exercise—it is said that you have to run for more than forty minutes before you even start burning fat. I chose running purely because it was the one I was most likely to stick with. In the past, when I worked out, I tried following instructors in aerobics classes or using various machines, but eventually found that none of them gave me a reason to keep going. Running was different. First, I could set a time, which reined in my scattered mind to some extent, made the practice more systematic, and gave me something to chase. Second, it required little theoretical knowledge or practical skill: just open your legs and run. Aerobics was another matter. A guy like me, with no dance cells and a missing string in his motor neurons, looked ridiculous doing even the simplest moves. And with machines, fiddling around without any knowledge only got me injured.
When I first started running, I knew nothing about running itself. I put on a pair of sneakers that were not running shoes and hit the road. At first my speed was around 8–8.5 km/h; I ran for 20 minutes, plus cool-down, for a total of 3 km. Usually by the 10-minute mark I was already gasping for breath, and the 20 minutes were something I barely endured. After each run, seeing the 3 km distance on the machine always put me in a good mood.
Later I discovered that a colleague who went to the gym every week had run last year’s Beijing Marathon. I was immediately in awe. Encouraged by this hotshot colleague, I added a new goal to my freshly begun running: run the half marathon at this year’s Beijing Marathon. That goal quickly replaced weight loss as my primary reason to run. My colleague recommended two WeChat official accounts, “Elopement” and “Marathon,” and in my spare time I would browse them and learned quite a bit about running. Only then did I realize how pitiable it is—with respect to running, and perhaps by extension to anything—to be in a state of “you don’t know that you don’t know.”
The first change brought by making the half marathon my primary goal was this: I extended each run to 5 km. The time varied, but was generally kept under 35 minutes. At the time this was no small challenge for me—I still did not know how to control the various negative emotions that boredom produced in my brain, so compared with physical discomfort, mental suffering was more deadly. As a born “king of sweat,” I do not like wearing earplugs when I run, because too much sweat makes anything stuffed in my ears extremely uncomfortable. So while others could enjoy the world created by music while running, I could only struggle with boredom. Watching an iPad while running seemed like a good option, and indeed, in the spirit of efficiency and energy saving, I watched a few NetEase Open Courses for a while, merging running time and study time into one. But gradually I realized that although this reduced the mental burden of coping with boredom, it greatly increased the physical burden on my eyes for processing images—the same principle as how reading during exercise harms the eyes. My already nearsighted and astigmatic “windows to the soul” could not sustain such wear and tear for long. In summary, in my early running days I was mainly fighting boredom.
At the stage when the struggle reached a fever pitch, I often sang children’s songs I sang to my little Bao to myself, cycling through a few tunes until I was sick of hearing them, then switching to another batch. I also tried recalling beautiful moments from life, then slowly magnifying and stretching them in my mind until they became a daydream. Singing or dreaming could only serve as auxiliary means of coping with boredom; neither could become a mainstream weapon for killing time. Later I began trying to outline in my head the article I was going to write that evening while running. This was a reliable method, because new ideas can be endless, and one idea can generate a great deal of material. Organizing this content in my mind—who the target audience is, what the theme is, what the structural framework is, what rhetorical devices to use, what complaints and self-deprecating jokes to work in—meant that thirty-odd minutes passed easily in one stretch.
Thus, gradually, I could steadily run for more than 40 minutes at a time, and my speed gradually approached 10 km/h.
Measured by the day, or even by the week, progress in running is very small—sometimes so small as to be negligible. But it is precisely these tiny improvements that accumulate into a larger result after a month or two. By April I could fairly steadily keep running for 40 minutes, covering a little more than 6 km. Compared with my starting state, both time and distance had doubled.
Right around that time, many readers recommended Haruki Murakami’s What I Talk About When I Talk About Running to me. As someone who had just entered the running life and was still in the suffering stage, seeing words like “pain is inevitable, suffering is optional” was like tasting the most exquisite chicken soup for the soul. So I drank that bowl of chicken soup down, and the more I drank, the more flavor I found, and the more I longed to challenge myself on a marathon course.
So throughout May I tortured myself with greater intensity. I hoped that by the end of May I would be able to run for an hour at an average speed of 9.5 km/h (a pace of about 6:30 per kilometer). This was a huge challenge, especially considering that I was traveling on business for two-thirds of May. But I persevered and managed the breakthrough I had imagined. Although after business trips, when exercising, I often had only enough time to run 30 minutes, my speed had stabilized at around 10 km/h, and occasionally I could even challenge 11 km/h.
At the time I had a persistent question: even if I was formidable on the treadmill, what kind of result could I actually produce on a real track, under the blazing sun? With this question in mind, on a colleague’s recommendation, I went to Elizabeth Lake in Fremont (a city in California) to test my mettle. Before that, the farthest I had run was about 10 km, and the longest was 67 minutes (the treadmill could run for at most 60 minutes at a time, plus up to 7 minutes of cool-down). Before running at Elizabeth Lake, in a very Ah Q fashion I set a goal of 20 km: the loop around the lake was 2 miles, which meant I had to run six laps.
The weather on the day of the lake run was good. I arrived before 7 a.m.; the sky was overcast, and a breeze from the lake made it slightly cold. The first lap felt easy. In the second half of the second lap I was already gritting my teeth. By the third lap I was gasping from start to finish. Based on my treadmill experience, my heart rate must have been at least 170, but I still gritted my teeth and finished the third lap at a steady pace. After three laps I was dying of thirst, so I went back to the car to drink water, then started running again. By the fourth lap my legs felt like they were filled with lead; 0.25 miles seemed like the longest distance in the world. During the fifth lap I was already very cowardly; for one stretch I “ran” at almost walking speed. When I finally reached the starting point, I was so tired that my legs involuntarily fled the track. Just like that, I gave up the last lap and ran five laps in total—10 miles, or 17 km—taking two hours. I was rather shocked by the result: after only a little more than two months of running, the half marathon no longer seemed like an impregnable fortress to me.
In June I assigned myself a quota of 120 km. In the end I ran 10 times and completed the 100+ km task. For the entire month I stabilized at a speed of around 10.5 km/h (a pace of roughly 5:45 per kilometer), and each run lasted an hour. By this point running was no longer a burden to me; I simply ran quietly, and after the first 5 km, every kilometer earned me a little encouragement. At the same time I kept using calories, time, and completed kilometers to set one new goal after another. I often “tricked” myself like this: just run for 40 minutes; you can rest after 40 minutes. Once I really ran 40 minutes, I looked at the energy readout: “Oh, I’m not far from 600 kcal—might as well run to 600 kcal before resting.” At 600 kcal I looked at the distance: only a few hundred meters from 8 km—might as well run to 8 km. In this way my brain and body played cat and mouse, and I kept “tricking” myself until the treadmill automatically stopped for a rest. Then I was filled with a sense of accomplishment.
Sometimes my heart really pounded so hard that physically I truly could not take it, and no amount of psychological “tricking” worked. Once I read an article saying that if you want to avoid knee injury on a treadmill, it is best to keep the incline between 0.5 and 2. On my next run I set the incline to 2 and started at 11 km/h. After three minutes I felt like I was about to die, so I hurriedly dropped the incline to 0.5 and the speed to 10.5 km/h and kept running. At 12 minutes I could not take it anymore. After slowing down I checked my heart rate: it was damn 179—no wonder I felt so awful. I ran slowly for a while until my heart rate dropped below 150. Not daring to be presumptuous, I finished the rest at incline 0 and 10 km/h. From then on I never again dared to casually add incline.
In the course of running, I tried many methods. The one I used most was steady running for an hour, then gradually increasing the speed. Once I read “Hardcore Fitness,” which introduced HIIT (High-intensity interval training), and I immediately applied it. Alternating between 10 km/h and 17.5 km/h was thrilling and very hard to endure. Practicing HIIT on a treadmill is troublesome; it is better to use this technique when running outdoors. Nevertheless, over the past month or so I practiced HIIT at least five or six times. I quite like the feeling of HIIT—it has a bit of that Dragon Ball feeling of a Saiyan fighting to the brink of death and coming back with doubled fighting power. Although HIIT cannot actually double my fighting power, that blacksmith-like intensity—torturing myself to the limit, then relaxing, then torturing myself to the limit again—suits my personality quite well.
I also briefly tried MAF180, but as an impatient person, slowing my heart rate down is very difficult at my current half-baked level. I found that with even a casual burst my heart rate would go above 140, so for now I have not found a suitable place for it.
This Saturday I went running at Nanhaizi. Under the blazing sun, a 3.3 km loop around the lake nearly killed me. The Nanhaizi track rises and falls, making it especially arduous to run. After one lap, I had lost too much water, and my body was not in good shape that day, so I did not continue.
July is approaching. My target is 150 km, and one outdoor 20 km run (at places like Nanhaizi or Olympic Forest Park).
Run, Forrest, run! As for running, I have only just hit the road.
