Doing Lake Centennial on a Saturday Morn

Last night I experienced a middle-of-the-night spell of insomnia, and as I was lying there hoping to fall back asleep my thoughts turned to running, jogging, walking, and exercising in general. It occurred to me that there are a whole complex of reasons for which we engage in such activities, and the reasons we start out with are not necessarily the ones we stay with.

The reason I started walking on a daily basis some five weeks ago was that I needed an activity for the after-dinner hour which would keep me from doing what I would otherwise crave to do: get myself prone and watch TV. That aggravates what I presume to be my hiatal hernia/gastroesophageal reflux disease (GERD) syndrome. It gives me a stomachache.

Actually, it worsened the chronic stomachache I'd been fighting for several months, and my eat-much-less-at-any-one-meal strategy had stopped paying off — except that it probably contributed to what was really an unanticipated weight loss of some 20 lbs. during 2005.

So "eat, then walk" became my new strategy. That evolved into mixing in some slow jogging ... doing it after breakfast instead of dinner ... and then before breakfast, as a way to start the day.

My stomach symptoms quickly began to diminish, not just while exercising or immediately thereafter, but all day long. They're now only about 10-20% of what they were. This may be due to the direct effects of exercise — or of deeper breathing during exercise — on the diaphragm, the muscle that separates the lungs from the stomach cavity. It may have to do with lowering my stress, producing more beta-endorphins, and triggering other biochemical changes in mybody and brain. Who knows what the full explanation is? All I can say is that for me, regular aerobic exercise has helped me minimize my symptoms of GERD.

With that, my reasons for running changed in their relative priorities. I hardly ever think about GERD relief any more. Mostly what I think about is getting that runner's high.


This morning I got high along with countless other folks who were doing the lovely 2.4-mi. circuit around Lake Centennial in Columbia, Maryland. And it was all legal.

Though I often go to Centennial during the week — I've walked around the lake hundreds of times over the years — today may have been the first time I've showed up on a Saturday morning in the summertime. I couldn't believe how many people were doing the same thing I was doing ... except that most of them were running, ahem, noticeably faster than I.

At one point, hearing an unusual amount of loud gabble approaching me from behind, I turned to see what seemed to be the entire student body of one of the local high schools gaining rapidly on me.

As I continued my ultra-slo-o-o-o-w jogging — exchanging greetings with a few of the bushy-tailed kids who were breezing by me like I was road tar — I managed to gain some information about the group from a pair of women joggers coming toward me from the opposite direction: this was just the track-team-wannabes from River Hill High School! But there must have been 200 of them!

Boy, did I feel old and out of shape. Not only were the teenagers making me look bad; the only other people who weren't passing me were walkers and those running in the other direction. At one point, I think I was lapped by a butterfly!

I even started inwardly chanting 'He who runs the slowed-down way, lives to run another day' to soothe my injured pride.


Why am I so slow? A lot has to do with the fact that, says my heart rate monitor, I'm ticking along at well over 90% of my measured maximum of 170 beats per minute, even when I run Centennial at my snail-like pace. My typical HR was between 157 and 164 today, and my final burst took me up to 168. I'm not dogging it, not by a long shot.

This confuses me. I ought to be really huffing and puffing, exercising in the ninth decile of my performance capacity. But that isn't what happens. Oh, I need to breathe fairly rapidly and deeply, true, to support 160+ bpm. But I'm not winded, I'm not gasping for breath, and I can talk easily enough. Nor am I sweating copiously, on these unusually cool August morns.

Only time will tell whether I'll ever be able to run any faster ... but I really don't care. After all, I'm getting just as much of a runner's high as any of those young whippersnappers from River Hill!