Why I Run ( Part 1 )

I sit on the edge of my bed with a weight wrapped around my right ankle.  I slowly extend the lower portion of my right leg until it is completely parallel to the floor, and then slowly lower this part of the leg back down until my right heel is about an inch from the side of of the bed.  I do this over and over again, and as I do this, my right knee makes a sound very much like the sound of crinkling bubble-wrap.  Eventually pressure starts to build up in the knee.  The bubble-wrap sound slowly fades away, and after a few silent extensions of the leg, the knee makes a huge CRACK sound when I extend the leg.

However, as bad as this all might sound, this really isn't a problem.

The problem is ...

... my right knee is my good knee!

So yeah, my knees give me trouble sometimes.  While some of these problems are the unavoidable consequence of being 41, a good deal of the problems I have with my knees can be directly attributed to my running regimen. Of course. most people who hear about my cracking knees ( or literally hear my cracking knees ) don't give me much sympathy.  They'll look at me in a bemused sort of way, and say things to me that often include words like "swimming", "biking", and "elliptical machine".  Let's face it - there are certainly lots of ways to do cardio that don't involve the wear and tear that running put on my knees.  So, considering all this, I guess the natural question I should be asking myself is ...

Why do I run?

Well, it might take a while to give a comprehensive answer to that question, so let me start by explaining why I even started to run in the first place.  My current love of running can all be traced back to one thing, and that thing is ...

Basketball


  If you've known for me a while or have read most of my previous posts, you probably already know that I had rather severe asthma as a child.  Back then, running long distances was the furthest thing from my mind.  Back then, I would have had an asthma attack if I tried to run the length of a city block.

All that started to change when my Dad built a basketball hoop in my backyard when I was about 12 ( BTW, when I wrote "built", I really did mean "built" rather than "installed".  I installed a basketball hoop for my kids last spring; my dad actually built a hoop for my brother and me.  One day, when walking home from the train station after work, he noticed an old basketball hoop ( just the metal part the ball goes through - there wasn't any backboard ) that had been left out in somebody's trash.  He decided to take the discarded hoop home and mount it on the garage in our backyard.   He took some leftover pieces from a metallic shelving system ( he had installed metalic shelves in our basement years earlier ) and basically built what looked like a 4 foot high by 3 foot wide metallic bookcase ( 1 foot deep ) with shelves 1 foot, 2 feet, and 3 feet off the ground.  He then attached a piece of plywood ( a piece about the sized of an NBA backboard - he painted the piece white )  to the front of this "bookshelf".  He attached the hoop to the backboard/bookshelf structure, and then attached the entire thing to the garage ( Actually, he may have attached the "bookshelf" to the garage first, and then attached the plywood/hoop, but you get the idea.  The entire hoop/backboard combo was completely homemade from discarded/spare parts. ).  I'll have to remind myself to thank my Dad the next time I talk to him.  That hoop gave me lots of enjoyment over the years, and the skills I eventually gained gave me an athletic confidence that will endure for the rest of my life.).  At the time my upper body was so weak that I couldn't reach the basket on a 15-foot shot unless I produced momentum by starting the shot between my  legs and moving the ball rapidly from between my legs to a foot above my shoulders before releasing the ball ( kinda like the classic underhanded shot a little kid might shoot, except that I would release the ball like a regular shot with one hand behind the ball ( rather than one hand on each side of the ball )).  However I quickly gained both strength and accuracy, and soon I found myself spending most of my free daylight hours shooting hoops.

  As I entered my teen years I really didn't have the endurance ( or the confidence ) to start playing basketball games against other teens ( and young adults ) in the local parks, but I had already started a training regimen that would build the foundation of my game.  I would take various mid-range shots from all over my backyard ( The deepest shots I could take from my backyard were from about 15 feet away.  There was a fence 7 feet to the right of the basket, so I really couldn't take any deep shots from the right side of the basket.  There was more room on the left side of the yard, but I had to contend with a garden that started at the left boarder of the garage and extended about 6 feet into the "court" ( There was a raised 2-inch concrete boarder around the entire garden, and a similar boarder about 3 feet from the right fence that extended about 3 feet into the "court".  I can't tell you how many ankles I twisted landing on those concrete boarders.  Those things are one of the reasons why I have a comically limited side-to-side range of motion in my ankles these days. ), as well as a peach tree in the garden and a clothesline on the far left side of our yard.  If I wanted to take a shot deeper than 15 feet, I needed to step into a narrow driveway between our house and our neighbor's house ( My aunts lived next door, which was a good thing for me.  I don't think that most people not related to me would have put up with the basketball noise all day ( not to mention the thousands of times I needed to go into their yard when the ball would go over the fence ))), and sprint toward the basket as soon as I released those mid-range shots.  Whether the shot went in or not I would jump in the air to catch ball as it came off ( or through ) the rim and put up a layup before I landed.  Doing this over and over again did 4 things for me:

1) It improved my mid-range shot.
2) It improved my leaping ability .
3) It gave me the ability to make off-balance layups with either hand from any spot near the basket.
4) It improved my endurance.

Yes "endurance".  That 9-letter word is really the whole point of all the rambling tangent-laden paragraphs above.  Basketball gave me endurance and help me overcome my childhood asthma.  Basketball is the reason why I ultimately had the ability to run regularly.

However, having the ability and the inclination to do something are two different things.  Despite that fact that I had mostly overcame my asthma ( pet allergies can still give me asthma attacks ) and had better-than average endurance, I never really had much of a desire to get my cardio exercise by running.  I figured jogging would be bad for my knees, and I was quite wary about my knees, especially considering they started making all sorts of weird cracking sounds by the time I was 16.

So, I really didn't do any kind of distance running until I was 31 ( I started my running regimen 10 years ago in  February of 2001 ), when basketball had an impact on my fitness again.  At the time, I was playing on the company basketball team.  I'd been playing on the team for 5 years ( I was actually one of the founding members of the company team.  If the company team had existed a few years earlier,I certainly would have joined the team at the age of 23 rather than 26.  I can't really take much credit for founding the team - the idea came from a guy I was supervising.  He was fresh out of college and asked me if our company had a basketball team.  When I told him we didn't have a team, he actually had the gumption to ask HR if the company could sponsor a team ( pay for league entry fees, uniforms, etc. ).  The next thing you know, management said "yes" to the request and we had a company basketball team. ), and while I was still enjoying the games ( we played 30 - 40 games a year ), I was starting to feel my age for the first time.

You see, jumping had always been a big part of my game.  Of course jumping is a big part of basketball in general, but I relied on my jumping ability a lot more than the average player.  The biggest weakness in my basketball game is my dribbling ability.  I'm not a bad dribbler these days ( I knew enough about the finer points of dribbling to teach Michael how to do it well ), but I've never really had quick hands, and dribbling wasn't a big part of the foundation of my game.  As I mentioned above, I taught myself to play the game with a regimen that involved a lot of shooting and jumping, but not much dribbling.  So, when I eventually gained the confidence to play games at the park,  I found that I didn't have much of an ability to dribble around people to get close enough to the basket to make all those off-balance layups I had practiced.  However, I found that I could jump around people.  I know that "jump around people" might seem like an odd term, so I'll offer the following example:

Often when I was driving towards the basket and  found a defender between me and the basket, I would leap directory towards the left or right shoulder of the defender.  I would then twist my body 90 degrees in the air ( so that my back was facing the defender ( so the defender couldn't really get his hands on the ball without reaching around me and fouling me ) and arch my back to avoid contact with the defender.  Once I got past the defender, I would twist my body 90 degrees back to its original orientation, and then put up a layup before I landed.

A basketball move like the one above ( plus many others where I would just jump into traffic and contort my body until I found space to put up a shot ) works fine if you can stay in the air long enough to pull it off.  I could easily stay in the air long enough when I was 21, but by the time I was 31, it was getting a little bit tougher.  I wasn't as if I was out of shape or anything, but very few people have as springy legs in their early 30's as they did in their early 20's.  So yeah, losing leaping ability as you age is a fact of life, but it was a fact I was having a hard time dealing with.  I constantly found my basketball brain writing checks that my body couldn't cash.  I would leap into the air with a plan of action, and found that I was landing before I could execute that plan.  I was only landing a split second earlier than I was in the past.  Most people probably wouldn't have even noticed, but I noticed, and knew I was going to have to adjust my game to adjust to this new reality.

So, I decided I needed to improve my endurance.  I knew I wasn't as quick and as fast as I was in my younger days.  I knew I could no longer outrun a lot of the younger guys at the beginning of games.  However, if I had better endurance than those younger guys, I might be able to outrun them at the end of games - when lots of games are won and lost.  Thus, I resolved to dramatically improve my endurance.  There were two treadmills in the fitness room of the apartment complex my wife and I were living in at the time.  I tried the treadmills out, set a few goals for myself, and the rest as they say, is history.

Still, why treadmills rather than exercise bikes, stair-masters, rowing machines, or elliptical machines?  Well, to lean that, you'll need to read Part 2.

Rich