A friend sent me a meme, a photo of a smiling young runner and a headline that said: “New Report Finds Most Effective Way to Run Well and Recover Quickly is to be 20 Years Old.”
I’m guessing a sizable portion of the more than 20,000 people who registered for the 49th annual Gate River Run can appreciate this.
And if you can’t, just wait.
If you do the River Run enough times, you get faster and faster. Until you don’t.
It has been 25 years since my first River Run. And I’m well aware these days, with my mailbox filling up with fliers about Medicare (a story for another day), that I’m definitely on the other side of the Green Monster, which is to say I can’t even make it to the base of the Hart Bridge in the time it used to take me to get to the finish line.
The beauty of running, it’s often said, is that you’re not competing against others, you’re competing against yourself. And that’s true. But so is this: At some point, your current self can’t beat the times of your past self.
I’m not going to lie. Part of me looks at the mile splits on my watch and thinks, “This can’t be right.” But part of me knows that in a few years, I’ll probably wish I could run that pace. Or run at all. So part of me is able to just be genuinely happy to do another River Run.
I’ve told my friend Paulette Butler that I want to be like her when I grow up. Paulette turned 75 the day before the River Run, and celebrated by preparing to run the race, just like she does nearly every year. And there were more than 100 registered runners older than Paulette.
Once upon a time, I dreamed of being like the elite runners. Now I dream of being like them.
River Run as a timeline
A couple of years ago my friend Karen Feagins was part of the “Untold Stories” event at the Florida Theatre. Karen’s story was about doing the River Run in her 20s, thinking it was a one-time thing for someone who long before labeled herself “not an athlete,” and how it became a nearly yearly thing, a timeline of her life in Jacksonville: before children, through tragedy, walking the race with her father for 10 years, missing it one year as her marriage fell apart, returning again and again since and — in her favorite River Run memory — running, dancing, over the Hart Bridge with her two daughters.
This timeline is something I’ve thought about often through the years.
Well, not this specific timeline with dancing up the Hart Bridge part. I have a hard enough time doing that on flat land.
In my case, the timeline has a gap of several years, when I couldn’t run more than a few hundred yards. At the time, I said that not running River Run was more painful than running it — an analysis I’ve since questioned every time I’ve lined up to do it again, grateful for that opportunity but keenly aware of what lies ahead.
If you do River Run once, it is a 9.3-mile journey that on its own has power and meaning. But if you do it a second time, there is a familiarity to the course and a personal comparison. And if you do it again and again over decades — and there still are Streakers who have done every race since its inception — it evolves into something much bigger.
It’s a timeline that is different from, say, photos from the annual holiday gathering. It comes with numbers — an age, a clock — that bring an acute awareness of time and its preciousness.
Miles of metaphors
A few years ago, while running through neighborhoods, I thought of reading John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” for some high school class.
That short story, first published in 1964, stuck with me in a way few other things I had to read at that age did. I loved how it mixed the real and surreal, how it was full of symbolism — a lot of which as a teenager I didn’t understand or appreciate.
It’s the story of Neddy Merrill blissfully entering middle age, lounging poolside at the suburban home of friends on a warm Sunday afternoon, deciding on a whim to return to his home — 8 miles away — via a novel method. He was going to swim home, through a series of pools.
As he swims, time warps, summer fades, fall arrives, and Neddy’s physical strength declines. By the time he arrives home, he finds it locked, dark and empty.
I sometimes think doing the River Run again and again feels like a long story, a bit of the novel “Once of Runner” mixed with “The Swimmer.” Only while “The Swimmer” became darker with each pool, “The Runner” becomes more joyful, and also bittersweet, with each bridge.
We aren’t as fast as we once were. And at some point, we realize we never will be again. But there also is a greater appreciation for the moment, for running through the neighborhoods and over the bridges, for friends and family here and gone, for the simple act of lacing up some shoes and moving.
mwoods@jacksonville.com
(904) 359-4212
This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Gate River Run: Over the bridges and through the years
Reporting by Mark Woods, Jacksonville Florida Times-Union / Florida Times-Union
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