I’ve been running.

A half-life ago, this described with absolute precision my general state at any given moment.  Running was my preferred activity and runner my proudest identity. Teenage interests harbored by more normal kids were lost on me.  Party at Lauren’s, parents out of town! I would have opted for a ten-miler followed by a wild evening of hydrating until I peed clear.

As in any good love story, there can be the time apart. It was not the diabetes, as you might suspect, which, in my strong-willed way only made me run further. I blame the legal profession (so often the culprit, right? Subject for a different blog post). I spent 70 weekly hours at a desk obsessing over commas, which significantly reduced the amount of time available for fun and healthy activities in general. I cooled it on the running.

I’m back at it for the moment.

Returning to formal training has been like getting back together with an ex after a breakup. It has been serendipitously running into said ex, say, during a cold February weekend in Paris in an encounter so out of context that chatting over Earl Grey at a café on Rue de Rivoli makes you see the greatness of a connection that was once strained by circumstance only.

The time apart from training has been important, if anything, for the general well-being of my joints. I’m back in training mode, and I have some initial observations.

I am older. This would appear obvious, but I am beginning to see that age is more precisely felt in the body than in the heart. I now finally understand what people mean by “Running is hard on the body.” As I approach the end of my weekly long runs, I can feel my hips, from the inside. This is new. I’m fairly certain I would have been unable to identify this body part once upon a time, when my whole frame moved so effortlessly in response to my will that my body existed as a fluid, one-piece thing. I can now feel its constituent parts, in particular the ones that have been put to work.  They ache for recovery. This has finally made me see the need for an “off day.”

I am in an older body, but also have an older soul. There was a time in which nothing was enough. PR? (This is runner speak for “personal record”). I wanted a better one. Today I can see this missed the point, and of course, being long past my PR days, no longer serves a purpose for me. I can run because it will bring me joy, or release, or stillness, whatever it may be on the day. I can also now think fondly to my old personal bests, the ones that were never enough. I can see they were magnificent. Now I marvel with sincerity at others’ bests in action, the unfathomably fantastic accomplishments that are a joy to celebrate and make me proud of the running collective (and of one T.A. in particular).

But I’ve still got it. To be clear, older but not old.

My competitive streak runs strong. This has always manifested itself in peculiar ways. My favorite workout as a student at Duke involved racing the C-1 bus that traveled between East and West Campuses. The bus traversed the wooded road linking the Washington Duke statue and the Chapel, and like the math problems that were my academic downfall, I’d begin calculating: if bus travels 20 miles per hour, and runner at 8, and bus and runner head west at the same time, with runner traveling direct and bus making eight 25-second stops along the 1.8 mile route, who gets there first? I very much wanted it to be me. My current version of this game involves tuk-tuks and tourists on Segways.

The (male) ego can be a fragile thing.  Last Friday, as I neared the end of a 14-miler, I passed a group of four guys who were running together. From the back their white t-shirts read “POLICIA.” Imagine my delight when I heard a “Don’t let her go, Joao” followed by the presumed Joao speeding up until he found himself in the wake of my wind shield, which, on that extremely blustery afternoon, was a particularly cowardly move. I idiotically engaged. I sped up. So did Joao. Then so did I, and so did he, and so on, until I was so infuriated by the impromptu race declared inconsiderately at the end of my long run, and so breathless from running a pace that I could not maintain, that I took a spontaneous left, crossed the street and left Joao racing on his own. No way I was going to lose. My ego becomes fragile too.

Beware of small dogs. Best to keep a safety distance. I’ve been lunged at by many a baby poodle.

Pain means less.  I remember t-shirts from my high school track days that said something along the lines of “Our sport is your sport’s punishment.” Running can be an exercise in managing discomfort or pain, depending on the day. The dread of pain promised by an upcoming 6 x 800 workout at one point in life consumed mental space. Somehow this type of pain is now less relevant.

The iPhone will be our downfall. There were no smartphones when I first started running. In the intervening years, smartphones everywhere have made us collectively less smart, and as a society we’ve now lost the ancient art of bodily awareness. One of the primary tasks as a runner involves dodging pedestrians whose downward gaze is permanently fixed on small screens that create ideal conditions for head-on collisions.

No runner no care. Runners are at the bottom of the pedestrian hierarchy. First come children, who ride their tricycles on the jogging path like queens and kings of the jungle. Then, strollers, selfie sticks, dogs on long leashes and bachelorette-bachelor cohorts, all part of a runner-agnostic obstacle course.

The wind is my running nemesis. In a mysterious Lisbon meteorological phenomenon, the wind will blow against you no matter the direction of your run. Does anyone out there understand how this works? I would love to hear your thoughts.