The Gift of Running Space

You can take the boy out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy.

May 23, 2013

Absence makes the heart grow fonder…and the feet go soft. Through travel I have realized that appreciating what I have is especially easy when I become familiar with what it is to be without. Missing running, especially when it isn’t due to injury, illness or an attempt to taper, puts ants in my pants.

That occurred to me a little over a week ago in one of the more beautiful places in the world: St. Martin, in the Caribbean. The island’s landscape was sensational and invited running, despite the heat and humidity.  But the roads were narrow and exceptionally busy with both automobile and motorcycle traffic that discouraged pedestrians of any speed.  The trails that I could find were very short in length and the beaches were interrupted by rocky outcroppings, walls, fences and coves. 

So I swam instead.  I swam with sea turtles and a giant spotted ray and the ocean became my trail.  But swimming isn’t running and I missed my sport after a day.  You can take the boy out of the mountains but you can’t take the mountains out of the boy.

Sure, this has happened on business trips and conventions, in places like Las Vegas, where the sidewalks are hardly runner friendly and traffic is less than accommodating.  In Salt Lake City, where winter temperature inversions and pollution collude to leave the air unbreathable. In Abu Dhabi, where there was only sand and heat for miles in any direction.  And in parts of Israel, Nicaragua, Singapore, Japan, Morocco, and areas other countries where it is either too congested or unsafe to run.

And all of that just left me feeling thankful for the fact that I have so many choices when it comes to running.  Living in Boulder, I can run west and hit the mountains, east for flat, north or south for rolling hills and I always have my choice of trails or road.  The air is clean and dry.  The weather varies greatly, sometimes during the same run.  It is safe and running is encouraged by the active population that supports the sport more than almost any other municipality in the world.

Less than a week after feeling like a caged animal unable to run, I found myself on high mountain trails, breaking away from sales meetings in the French Alps and pinched myself with the glory of the sense of freedom it brought.  The boy was back in the mountains!