Open my top drawer, and you are bombarded by running socks. Believe it or not, I have more pairs of socks than I have running shoes. Dig a little deeper, and you will see that some of these socks are missing their partner. Forever relegated to the back of the drawer in shame, hoping to be mismatched with another on a laundry day. But how did these socks end up alone?
As it turns out, socks are not the only things running takes away.
For most people, socks are lost in the laundry room. Lost to the washing machine, never to be seen again. Runners? We know exactly where we left ours. When you gotta go, you gotta go. And that is never more true than when on a run. Movement has a way of getting things moving and sometimes that results in sacrificing a sock to help take care of things.
So go down a sock or use the sketchy bathroom? The decision becomes easier in hindsight. Running makes you unafraid of restrooms. Whether that is finding the closest store or the construction site porta potty, all bets are off the table when it is time to go. You learn to memorize the ‘best’ spots along your running route. You rank stores based on their restroom.
The woods are always a viable backup plan, but come prepared, or your sock drawer will never look the same.
I admit I have become jaded when it comes to distance. A five-mile run on the calendar can often feel like an off day in comparison.
The longer we run we begin to lose our sense of distance. We start to measure distance by whether we can run it. Just over thirteen miles from your destination, oh, I can run that far. Running rewires your brain’s GPS. Needing a ride after dropping your car off for service turns into you running back home since it is ‘only’ a couple miles.
Someone tells you they live six miles away, and your first thought isn't how long it takes to drive there. It's that it would make for a nice, easy run. You catch yourself saying, "It's only eight miles," before realizing everyone else in the room thinks you've completely lost it.
Three miles is short. Ten miles is manageable. Twenty miles is just going to require an early alarm.
The majority of my family and friends thought I lost my mind a long time ago when I started my running journey. Little did they know that it was only the beginning.
From the outside, running is an insane concept. Voluntarily running. You have probably heard them all before: "I don't even drive that far," "You paid to run?" and "You'll only see me running if something is chasing me." We lost our minds as soon as we laced up our running shoes.
It only goes downhill from there. Though I have not personally experienced it, I have heard many tales of ultra runners hallucinating after hours on their feet, sleep-deprived. Even the more ‘normal’ distances have us trying to do simple math in our heads that typically ends up wrong from exhaustion.
The longer we run, the stranger we become. Running before sunrise feels normal. Paying to suffer sounds like a good time. You start planning vacations around races. Our sanity goes a mile at a time.
Whether you have lost a sock in the woods, called a five-mile run "easy," or tried to calculate your pace only to completely forget how math works, a runner's definition of normal is different, to say the least. What seems strange to everyone else is just another Saturday morning.