Marathon Training: Beach Running for Stronger Calves, Flexible Ankles, Spiritual Endurance

Run Beaches When You Can for Fitness Benefits

I'm at Duxbury Beach, twenty-five odd miles south of Boston, warming down at the end of a long run, and the illusion is in, magnifying a tugboat and a barge offshore. The droplets pushed into the air by today's northwesterly wind have created the optical illusion of monstrousness you see often along a seashore.

It works like this. The tug, out of Boston, is sledging a barge towards the Cape Cod Canal. Though both vessels lie on the horizon, their images project over the horizon at twice their height, and at first I wonder at the warship looming on the horizon with such awful, massive power. Then the angle of the lens created by the mist shifts, and the vessels shrink to smudges on the horizon.

What is known as the spring tide has almost completely drained the bay and the bay is a plateau of mud flats. Across this sodden drain lies Plymouth Beach. The beach is a blur of blown sand. Beyond it, Browns Bank, the waves breaking on it flattened by the leveling force of the wind. Off its eastern edge of the bank lies a placid rolling bounce, a curl of whitewater.

The spring tide has brought commercial clammers to the shore. They work the flats, bent to their work in the lee provided by a forest just inland. Across the bay the largest of the eelgrass flats near the main channel has emerged. In an open skiff a couple of local shellfishermen are tending to racks of oyster spat. A half dozen kite surfers in the High Pines Basin are ripping along at about nine hundred miles an hour.

Not with any of this in mind, really, but simply with my long Sunday run done, I get into my car. I've run the length of the beach roughly twenty times these past five months. It's about eleven miles round trip. I'm using the run to get my up distance up for a marathon. I'd read that soft sand is good for the calves, rocky sections good for the ankles' ability to roll and flex. Humid days this summer I'd seen across the twenty-odd miles of Cape Cod Bay the parabolic dunes of the Province Lands outside Provincetown. The glare of the highest, Mt. Ararat.