Time flies when you’re having fun

This morning I had the pleasure of doing my long run with my brother who is in from out of town.  We’re both training for spring half-marathons, so our long runs are about 2 hours now.  We were chatting about how, a few short years ago, neither of us would have guessed we would ever run for 2 hours, never mind some of the other lengths of time we’ve run since.

Completely aside from the physical aspects of running for 2+ hours, I have been asked how on Earth one can run for that length of time.  When I think about it, it really is hard to fathom.  I mean, think about two hours for a moment.  2 hours is the length of time it takes to watch the average feature film.  Two hours at work gets me from starting time until break.  It’s about the length of time it takes to play a 6-player game of Trivial Pursuit, get a few loads of laundry done, or a long time to sit in a car.  So yeah, I can see why 2 hours seems like an awfully long time to be doing the fairly straight-forward activity of running.

But as anyone who has run for that long can tell you, the passage of time is completely different when you’re running.  You’ve got a route to cover, and you just do.  It is like it is a different plane of existence, slightly out of synch with the rest of the world.  While you’re out there, it simply doesn’t feel like you are ticking through 2 hours of time.  Yet somehow, there are days when, even though it doesn’t feel like you’ve been at it for that long, when you get back, you feel like it is much later than it really is.  It’s a bit bizarre, and really hard to explain to someone who hasn’t done it.  I’ve tried, and people will say, “oh, okay.”  But in reality, the words are just inadequate to describe the experience.

Maybe that’s okay.  If everyone truly got it, it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun to say to people, “yeah, I ran for 2 [or 3, or 4] hours this morning.”