Running partner wanted: 6-10 miles 2-3 times a week. Conversational pace at about 8 min/mile with some runs slightly faster. Wedgewood neighborhood, flexible schedule.
I haven't been running much lately; not since last August when my running partner, Mike, moved to South Carolina. It surprises me how completely I have let running slip out of the routine of my life. Back in early October when I noticed that I hadn't been out on a run in over a week, I took stock of my motivations and concluded that drastic measures were necessary. So I bought a new pair of shoes. After a full Seattle winter their neon-green highlights are still garish and they look as fast as they did on the wall at Olympic Sports. I'm considerably slower.
It's not that I've stopped exercising altogether; I put fenders on my road bike and broke out my rain-gear. I also trudged down to the pool and swam laps a few times. (The swimming was only slightly wetter than the bicycling.) This spring I'm not the model of aerobic efficiency, but the people at the blood bank still comment on my low pulse-rate and blood pressure. I miss running sometimes, but its absence doesn't leave a big hole in my life. The real problem is that I miss Mike.
Mike and I met almost a decade ago as first-year graduate students in psychology. I remember thinking during a break in the first orientation session that he seemed every bit the intellectual smart-ass. Tall and skinny, with thin light-brown hair and an earring, his clever-but-caustic comments and snickering laugh drifted through the group, as distinctive and potentially annoying as the smoke from his Marlboro. Over the next five years or so I didn't have cause to substantially alter that initial perception. Our paths crossed often -- for the second six months of that first year we even shared a "group home" with three other grad students - - but even though we were always on good speaking terms and grew to know alot about each other, I wouldn't say we really knew each other at all.
In many ways, we were on parallel paths in life. Both of us had the ability to do well in our respective specialties, but found ourselves drifting through graduate school, questioning whether we had chosen careers that truly matched our interests. Eventually, but not simultaneously, we both took year-long breaks from our graduate programs, earning paychecks by doing applied research in commercial settings. During those times, each of us sought out physical challenges: Mike bicycled across much of the country, I raced in an Ironman triathlon. We both spent a lot of our first years in Seattle working hard at growing up.
I don't really think there was one particular point in time when Mike and I first became friends. Trying to define that point is like trying to say exactly when spring changes to summer. Both processes involve neither effort nor awareness, they move forward, then back, then forward again, until a time when it is obvious that the change has already been made. There may not be a single point in time when we became friends, but I do know the way it happened: it was through running.
We were both back in the psychology department trying to be graduate students again. Once or twice a week we saw each other in the mail-room or outside the building where Mike sat to smoke. When we talked, it was almost always about bicycling or running. Several times Mike mentioned that he wanted to start a serious training program. I was skeptical because I had often heard him say similar things in the past but had yet to observe any sustained action (this was a guy who had ridden further in the first two days of his cross-country bicycle trip than the total amount he had ridden in training). It also didn't help Mike's credibility when he punctuated his speech by gesturing with a lit cigarette. Within a few weeks though, Mike surprised me. He started showing up at an informal track workout that I told him about. Every Wednesday we would both meet about 20 other runners at the Greenlake track and do speed-work; usually intervals or hills. Mike and I only lived about a half-mile apart, so we started running to the track together. On the way we would complain about the red dust from the cinder track, compare the various aches and twinges in our quads and calves, and debate the merits of Nikes vs. Adidas. After a few months I started seeing him less often at school. Eventually I figured out that was because I no longer saw him outside smoking.
That summer I had planned to focus on short triathlons and running 10Ks, but Mike wanted to run a marathon. He also wanted me to train with him. I'm not sure why I agreed. I guess I actually prefer the longer races. I also recognized that on the days when Seattle was shrouded in a cold steel-gray mist, the siren song of my couch and television would usually be drowned out by the thought of Mike's sarcastic response if I were to call him and bag the run. We both entered the Seattle Marathon and set a training plan for the next six months. We ran together on Tuesdays and weekends, and continued with the track workouts on Wednesdays.
At least once a week for the next two years or so Mike and I ran together. We were always flexible about skipping a run if our schedules were busy, and we quit going to the track workouts a month or two before that first marathon, but late afternoon on Tuesday and Thursday became our usual times to be out on the roads.
Somehow, in the course of those two years of running Mike became my best friend ever. I didn't expect it, and I didn't try to make it happen (maybe that's part of the reason it did), but through all those miles and months, Tuesday and Thursday evenings became a forum for both of us to theorize and wonder and brag and laugh and share and move.
We talked during all but the fastest stretches of a run; the conversation interspersed with short and long pauses that might have felt awkward in a coffee-shop or bar, but that went unnoticed on a run, covered by the sounds of our own breathing and the passing of the familiar landmarks. Over the first few months, the range of depth and significance in the topics of our conversations grew. Eventually, a single run might include attempts to articulate our career aspirations, discussion of the latest "Far Side", and talk about the women in our lives (or lack thereof). I remember running up Stone Way on a sunny October afternoon, talking about the woman I had lived with for five years, saying out loud for the first time how our relationship had become rote and hollow. Talking to Mike as we ran up the hill, glancing sideways to check my stride in the reflection of the plate-glass windows, I realized that the relationship was dead, and that I had to leave it behind.
Not every run was so serious. In fact, the common features of most runs were the moments of inspired idiocy. One site in an ongoing duel of nefarious wit and cunning was the northwest corner of the outer path around Greenlake. This point was the scene of our ritual sprint, the goal of which was not only to be first to reach the corner, but also to handicap or hoodwink each other, preferably by the most devious or stupid means possible. For example, early run complaints about shin-splints or tight hamstrings might be followed miles later by a suggestion that we skip the sprint in order to prevent any further damage to the traumatized tissue. Of course, as we neared the sprint point, the wounded and limping party was likely to suddenly burst forward, miraculously healed by the wondrous waters of Greenlake. Alternately, one could take the stupid approach, waiting until the last possible moment before pointing in a random direction, shouting, "What's that!?" and then dashing ahead. After 30 or 40 such tricks neither of us trusted anything that the other said as we neared the northwest corner of Greenlake, but that only added to the challenge.
With the passing of hundreds of miles, Mike and I shared the foundations for a hundred other stories, a thousand other things I miss: thirteen miles into a sixteen mile run and deep into glycogen depletion, laughing uncontrollably at the sign for "Seattle House of Hose: Your One Stop Hose Shop"; being drenched with water and road grit by a passing car on a day when my mood matched the foul weather, then surprising both myself and Mike by turning to shout, "Fuck you!" and giving the driver the finger, forgetting that I had thick white socks over my hands because of the cold. Things just happened out there along the roads.
Mike's nearly the width of the country away now. He's still a smart-ass. We talk on the phone every couple of months or so and send e-mail more often. He was in Seattle around Thanksgiving to visit his girlfriend, so we went running a few times. They broke up after Christmas though, and I don't expect he'll be coming back here very often. We're friends in virtually all the ways that we were when he left. Still, the rhythm of my life has been disturbed in a way much deeper than I anticipated. I miss my friend. I miss having him as a running partner.
I've been running off-and-on for almost twenty years and I've run alone for the vast majority of that time. I still prefer to bicyle alone, setting my own pace, falling into a nearly meditative state of mind. But running has changed now: out on the roads and trails I often feel more lonely than alone. I don't want it to revert to a solitary activity.
Although an irrational part of me wishes differently, I know
that finding a new running partner won't reestablish the same
rhythm of exercise and fellowship that I had with Mike. Still, a
routine that has served as a framework for building one friendship
might serve the same function for another. In the routines of my
life, opportunities to build friendships are rare. I like to run.
I need to have friends. I'm looking for a running partner.