Dark
Using December to restore
In Los Angeles, we fear September, not February. If you’ve never experienced it, Los Angeles September days are copies of copies of copies. Glaring, perfect, endless blue skies appear in oppressive succession like the flawless, threatening smiles of a nightmare chorus line. It’s enough to drive you crazy, just like the depressing
trundle of sopping, consumptive, claustrophobic winter days are in colder places.
But this is neither September nor February, and everywhere loves December.
In the darkest part of the year, after the heat has broken and before the winter starts to bite, people put up colored lights and put their fireplaces to use. Fall race season ends and training runs extend lazily out into the off-season sprawl. We runners start to calibrate our winter layers and training plans, and consider how we might best set ourselves up for the long months of dark, cold runs.
I love this season. It feels like recovery from the entire rest of the year. It’s tempting to hang it all up for a while; to take time off, but there’s a utility to running through this early winter season that’s almost unbeatable: without the pressure of races (if you’re into that), or great weather to take advantage of, or even of New Year’s resolutions, you can truly run only for you. There’s almost no extrinsic motivation to get you out there in December. It’s all you, if you can pull it off.
At this time of year, I try to use the cold air to feel my breath and my lungs. I try to use the chill of my muscles at the beginning of my runs to notice where I can stretch and where pain begins and ends in my body. The concentration of feeling that’s a byproduct of this lonely training season is an advantage not to be overlooked, as it’s only when we can be alone that we can re-orient ourselves to the people we are now, to the runners we’ve become over the last year.
I’ve been running for 35 years now. When I started, shoes didn’t have carbon fiber or even air. There was one type of running short. Leggings as we know them did not exist. Over the last decades, I’ve felt myself change as a runner, but never as consciously and acceptingly as at this time of year. I can depend on the fact that every year, the darkness descends; the colored lights appear; the snow falls or it doesn’t. The dry, sharp air fills my lungs, and I stretch out, creaking at first, to feel the first hard impact of my shoe on the run surface. I feel who I’ve become over the year; the injuries and the comebacks; the triumphs and the set backs.
I hope you all examine your runs this month for the glory that is the examination itself. Whatever you do, don’t skip them right now. The season is mellow and the air is cold, but the time is right for assessing yourself outside of race times and vital signs. This is the season to run in, if by running you mean to get to know yourself.
So whether it’s frigid, chill, or even creeping up on summertime where you are, remember, go run.