Redemption Center

Ann started running with me and the rest of the running group out at Stone Mountain beginning with the summer of 1994, just prior to starting the seventh grade. We had a pretty good running enclave that included runners of all ages, and most were quite capable and competitive.

As a rising seventh grader with a modest mileage base, Ann could keep up with the group for a couple miles, but couldn’t immediately manage the full 5-mile loop; no one that young could. She went the distance, but not the pace we were running for the whole distance. As the weeks went by, and Ann ran with me on the weekdays as well as the weekends, each weekend she was able to keep up with the group for greater distances, and eventually kept up for the entire 5-mile loop. It was a rite of passage into adulthood.

Our group didn’t “run for fun”. Our group ran because we enjoyed competition. We would often run sociably for a couple miles to warm up, but then it was time to jack up the pace to find out who was at the top of the totem pole that day. Many workouts turned into races. This is the running environment Ann grew up in. It wasn’t long before Ann was joining me at 5K and 10K races around the Atlanta area and all over Georgia.

As I said, the training often resembled a race, so the training gave us a close approximation of what we were capable of over a range of distances. We had a pretty good idea of what time to shoot for at a 5K or 10K race. Because of our competitive environment, we didn’t shoot for conservative times. We targeted times that were ambitious, and it was all too easy to miss the targeted time due to the least imperfection in race conditions or fitness.

Most road races were on Saturday mornings, so we would find ourselves at Stone Mountain on Sunday mornings having failed to attain the unreasonable times we had set for ourselves. We called these Sunday morning runs “The Redemption Center” or “Redemption Runs”.

Ann and I, and the rest of the group, would bitch and moan about how we had failed to run the impossible times we had set for ourselves the day before. We never concluded that the target time was too fast, or the race conditions were sub-optimal, or our fitness was lacking. We always concluded that we had wimped out, or our bodies had betrayed us, and so we had to punish ourselves and our bodies for the failure of the day before.

So it was that after only a mile of warm-up on Sunday, the day after a race, at least one of us would jack up the pace to a self-punishing level to prove that we weren’t as bad as we felt. Usually all of the racers would join the punishment posse, and the folks who had not raced would join in because they were “fresh meat” and could keep up with little difficulty.

We knew logically that it was scientifically wrong to run hard two days in a row, but we did it anyway because our emotional sides needed it. We were angry with ourselves, we were angry with the results, we were angry with our failure, and it felt like we were doing something about it. Unfortunately, what we were doing was stupid.

I remember Ann had a high school race that she felt was particularly poor. She was in a real foul mood in the car on the way home and I could tell she was going to be a real pain in the butt for days until she had a really good workout, or a really good race, and thereby redeem (there is that word again) that day’s race and the resulting poor self image.

When we got home it was late on a Saturday night. I suggested that Ann go to Mountain Park Park (not a typo) and do a Redemption Run on the soft trail in the woods. The sun had been down for hours, but off we went anyway. I accompanied Ann for several hard miles on the trail, narrowly avoiding trees that suddenly loomed up in the darkness as the trail wove its way through the woods. Eventually fatigue set in, and better sense prevailed, and one of us finally came to the realization that “this is nuts!”

We had a good laugh. The Redemption Run had done its job and we headed home for showers and comfortable beds.