That's because they don't know about the syzygial nature of runners' lives. As an example of a syzygy, runners are often both ambitious and lazy, so I'll save you a trip to the dictionary, and let you know that a syzygy is a pair, usually of opposites. (For quick reference, think of Phyllis Schlaffly and Pamela Lee Anderson chairing a conference on family values.)

This aspect of running was wonderfully captured in a Nike ad of a few years ago. Its depiction of a cordial-sipping restaurant patron looking with smug bewilderment at a runner streaking past on a dark, rainy night was the cause of much discussion among my acquaintances, runners and nonrunners both. (Yes, I have a few of the latter.) A superficial glance at the ad often led my friends to debate, sometimes with scary ferocity, which character in the ad they'd rather be. That misses the point.

Consider my post-workout imbibing. My training partner likes to say on our cooldowns that having done our duty on the track, we're now free from responsibility the rest of the evening. For me, for better or worse, that usually means doing nothing more than having a few cold ones. Having been through such a severe process, having spent more physical and mental capital in the last hour than in the preceding 48 hours combined, I revel in the chance to explore the opposite. How much sweeter Miller time is, with its attendant mindlessness and looseness of limbs, when so recently I was drowning in a sea of lactic acid. In other words, an either/or reading of the Nike ad is a false dichotomy. Why can't we be both? I'd bet the restaurant goer isn't enjoying his drink as much as the runner will when he gets home.

Lest the overly sensitive accuse me of promoting drinking, let's broaden the discussion. I have a sedentary friend who daily buys a massive fountain soda, usually with the preface, "I'm dying of thirst." She then proceeds to sip about two ounces per hour. (I'd hate to see how much she would nurse the drink if she didn't think herself parched.) She should try a two-hour run from her apartment in Maryland next August; then we can talk about thirst. The same applies for overstatements about hunger like, "I'm starving to death." Doubtful, given the adequate adipose stores most of us carry around, and more pertinent here, meaningless. You want hunger? Put in a 20-mile day, then discover your pantry is nearly bare. You'll be amazed at how ambrosial a spaghetti sauce sandwich can be.

The syzygy phenomenon explains why the running lifestyle can be so seductive. Runners know that we live through a wider swing of the pendulum than most. How can you care about the weather when your day consists of moving from one shelter to the next, from house to car to office, and back? How can you enjoy an easy chair if you haven't worked hard? How can you long for bed when you've never been fully awake?

As the 19th century Transcendentalists liked to say, life is sweetest lived near the marrow. What was true 150 years ago is more so today, when what passes for normal existence is defined by what Neil Postman has called technopoly—if something can't be judged through the sterile filter of economic expediency, it's roundly relegated to, at best, quaintness. When life is built around the fax machine, the beeper and traffic updates every ten minutes, a primal pursuit such as running is one of the few entrees into the happy poverty of slow, simple pleasures: donning warm, dry clothes after an hour in the rain; standing exhausted but proud in the shower; lying quietly on the sofa; and, sometimes best of all, simply stopping moving.

Put another way, let's just say it's a good thing I only go to the track once or twice a week.

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