Inevitably, the prose of these entries fails to meet the aspirational dreams and fantastical beliefs that I’ve crafted the perfect bon mot/insight/tale/”blog post.” I’ve mentioned before the John Ford film The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962). It has that famous quote:
“When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”
The problem with reality is that it so often falls short of what we see in our heads or dream in our thoughts. It can be a debilitating realization that sometimes we do everything we can think of and it still doesn’t turn out the way we hoped or imagined. That can rob the spirit and the momentum for carrying on, for trying again, for striving to achieve something for yourself against the obstacles of realistic constraints to time, space, and energy.
I say this because I worry my “blog posts” – even typing that as a literary concept makes me feel I’ve failed my aspirational hopes for being a writer – are so imperfect and rambling that they lose much of their efficacy. In my bid to do a decent post each day, I find myself wondering if I’m opting for quantity over quality, if in a mad dash to finish a post I’m missing the point I was trying to make when I first set out to write the entry. Again, I’m not 100% sure I know what this runkevinrun.com experiment is. I’m not sure who the audience is, or if there’s an audience. There’s no cigar-chomping editor barking orders from a glass enclosed office, no external clock ticking on the deadline to get the words to the printers so it can make the late edition. All of the demands on getting things onto the site are because of a pact I made with myself.
I say all of this because in thinking about all of this as it relates to running, I was reminded of training programs that deem mid-week runs “garbage miles.” I’ve never liked that phrasing but part of that is because of the definition I heard for it from runnerati. I recently found a 2012 article by C.J. Schexnayder that deployed that terminology for the self-proclaimed runner know-it-alls and discussed “The Great Garbage Miles Debate.” There’s apparently a great many opinions amongst runners as to just what garbage miles might mean. For some it’s unnecessary mileage that does nothing for the training; there’s quite a bit of disagreement over the fine line between under and over training. For other runners, they view the garbage miles as running for fun, the distances you do at whatever pace to get out and see the world and just enjoy the mental and physical flow of movement.
When I first heard the term, it was from a runner who was dismissive of the lower mileage runs during the week but viewed them as a necessary evil to support the long weekend training run. It didn’t matter what you did in those miles so long as you put in the time and distance – they were just run because this runner felt they had to be run. I don’t have a problem with the notion of the “garbage miles” as a necessary thing to do during the week. To be honest, I’m a bit addicted to the endorphins and to the chance to get out onto the road. The time spent running can be mentally freeing, as I puzzle over something consciously or subconsciously as the miles go by. It’s also a chance to disconnect from phones, screens, paper, everything. Sometimes getting away from all that noise and cacophony is the best way to return to it.
As a result, I prefer to think of “garbage miles” as the building blocks of running. You use those miles to maintain fitness, to build upon that base of fitness to improve endurance, speed, quality of life, or any other positive outcomes. To me the supposed “garbage miles” are better viewed as “raw material miles” or more simply “raw miles.” They’re what we use to create something greater than the miles and ourselves. I am the first to agree that sometimes those “raw miles” are terrible and/or “garbage.” There are days when I simply do NOT want to go out and run. It’s too cold, too hot, too rainy, too dreary; I’m tired, I’m in a lousy mood, I’m feeling slothful and bloated and yucky. And inevitably it’s those days that I really NEED to go for a run. Because no matter how bad the run is, no matter how “garbage”-y the run might be, it’s better to HAVE run than to HAVE NOT run. I may not always like going out or the physical act of running, but I can assure you I’m ALWAYS glad TO HAVE RUN. I may not be happy with my speed or the experience but there’s something to be said for starting and finishing. There’s something to be said for the having done.
Which brings me back to these blog postings. They aren’t perfect. They’re never going to be perfect. There’s going to be typos, there’s going to be missed opportunities or threads I meant to explore and failed to do justice to… there’s even going to be times when I mean to discuss something and just forget entirely to do so. Whole sections may be omitted that may make the posting chaotically confusing and a disappointment to me, to you, to everyone. That’s going to happen, guaranteed. But hopefully with each posting I’ll get a little better. The writing will eventually get a little more focused, a little more honed. The volume of writing will serve as the building blocks. These “garbage posts” enable the bigger, more important ones to pay off in the same way that the raw miles lead to a better marathon experience for me.
And so I carry on, striving to improve. There will be good days and bad days. But they will be days. And the cumulative effect will be for the better. If I didn’t believe that, I don’t know what I would believe. The reality can give us hope or despair but the legend? The legend gives us hope. It guides us to the future with aspirational dreams of what may have come before and what might again.
And so I carry on, striving to improve, searching for legends.