Fair-weather runners sprout each spring the way plants shoot from moist soil in warm sunshine. Out of their winter caves, they squint and stretch and toe out tentatively, jogging in Gallup and sprinting in Buhr, tightrope running along downtown sidewalks, and breathing in fumes along Stadium and Packard.

But this story’s not about them. It’s about committed runners, who travel in packs, early in the black of the morning–the ones who’ve showered and dressed and are on their way to work, or are already at work, before most of us have even started to think about climbing out of bed. These masochists roam Ann Arbor’s streets and trails year-round–in skin-searing heat and in beard-freezing cold and in eyelid-closing sleet. Take a 6 a.m. drive around town if you don’t believe me: nothing but construction workers, the homeless–and runners.

I’m a fifty-four-year-old lifelong runner who’s been falling out of love with running for a decade. For most of this year I communed with the Ann Arbor running subculture, uncovering more than thirty town-based groups and running with nearly twenty of them as I tried to rediscover its joys. One Saturday morning, as I trudged into Gallup Park with the Windemere Runners, three other groups flew by us: Running Fit 501, a long-distance team established by the local running store and coached by Kathleen Gina; Team in Training, a national group that helps local teams train for Leukemia & Lymphoma Society fund-raising races; and PR Fitness, devised by personal trainers Rob Morgan and Marie Wolfgram to provide not only running but also other forms of fitness training. I felt an urge, as I veered with the Windemere Runners onto Gallup’s running and biking path, to signal our merge with a blinker.

Virtually all runners extol solo running for its head-clearing benefits, but group running is what sustains them. Though membership in local running groups is diverse, there’s also a disproportionate quotient of super-execs, as well as doctors, lawyers, engineers, retirees, and personal trainers. Disciplined, organized, high-achieving, fastidious Type-A types. So why do they spend so much time running?

—

The desire to look and feel fit is a given. Everyone who runs in packs looks younger than they are–especially the Running Goddesses, women of nearly all ages who conduct speed workouts at the U-M track every Tuesday morning. The name was adopted as a lark when one casually joked, “Oh, we’re the running goddesses.” But since I struggled behind most of them as they raced through their interval regimens, I know these women are not only speedy, they’re shapely.

“I run so I can eat whatever I want” is a common claim–I’ve made it myself–but most of these runners are skinnier than I am, and seem to care little about food. (They guzzle something called GU during long-distance runs, if that gives you any idea.) No one who’s got twenty miles to run in the morning is staying up all night pounding beers–though Windemere runner Joan Keiser says the group’s trip to the 1998 Chicago Marathon that bonded them forever featured an assortment of pre-race food orgies, so I’m not suggesting committed runners don’t know how to have a good time. I’m just asking how they get their kicks.

Much is made of “runner’s high”–the endorphin/dopamine-fueled rush that scientists continue to probe as a physiological explanation for the psychological propensity to return to an activity that is not inherently pleasurable. But very few say they’ve experienced it, and those who have say it’s fleeting.

“Never had ‘runner’s high’ or have any idea what it might feel like,” says Tom Bourque, co-founder and captain of the Nasty Boys Glee Club. Charlotte Carne, who runs with the Dawn Patrol–a females-only group that runs to the Arboretum or to the outskirts of town in search of serenity at sunrise–says she feels it only on the rare occasions when she manages, during a long run or race, to run negative splits (running each mile faster than the last). “You feel invincible, like you’re running on air, and with no pain,” Carne says.

But what about that pain? I know when I’m feeling it, but Mariza Brimhall, another Dawn Patroller, says she just doesn’t think about all that “miserable stuff” when she’s running. “It’s painful,” admits Brimhall, “but just getting into a rhythm is soothing for me.” And KT Tomey, who runs with several groups, doesn’t even know what you’re talking about when you complain about pain. “Running feels good,” Tomey says. “Not in a sit-on-the-porch-with-a-glass-of-wine kind of good, [but] the kind where … your vision is like Superman’s. You see every root and rock … You notice the incline, the pull of the wind, the slope of the sun.” Sounds like someone’s high.

Many start running to feel better in some way. Dawn Patroller Lexanne Creitz sought running refuge thirty years ago to help ease the pain of her brother’s death. Nasty Boy Mark Cameron’s wife died when their children were three and six years old. Cameron says he ran to cope with depression but also because “I had a responsibility to make sure I was going to be available for my children.”

In my mid-twenties I was both a casual runner and a casual smoker until I accepted a challenge from a fellow UCLA law school student to put out my cigarette and train with a group of students and professors for the 1981 Los Angeles Marathon. Afterward I swore off marathons, but I also swore off smoking and got hooked on daily running. I had developed a new (and presumably healthier) habit that I didn’t want to kick.

“I would say I’m an habitual runner,” says Running Goddess Barbara Rigney. “It’s just a part of my life, like brushing my teeth.” When I asked Windemere Runners Joan Keiser and Mike Kucera how they felt immediately after finishing the twentieth and last mile of a marathon training run, Kucera was subdued. “It’s kind of like having just cleaned out the garage,” he half-joked–something that had to be done, though he felt good about doing it.

But Keiser was unreserved. “I like it!” she nearly screamed as she stretched in the Gallup Park parking lot, plenty of energy to spare. “I just really like it. I really do.”

Passion is what keeps most habits alive, and every runner I spoke to proudly pledges a running passion–though only two confess obsession. One is Noontime Y runner Larry Friedman, who has run in every Dexter-to-Ann Arbor race (now called DXA2) except the first one–which means since 1975. Since his retirement, he says, “My job is to exercise.” The other is Running Fit impresario Randy Step, who refers to himself in all of his correspondence as “The Obsessed Runner.” J.D. Lindeberg, another Noontime Y runner, says his relationship with running seems “pretty healthy” to him, “but maybe you should ask my wife.” I did not.

—

Ann Arbor’s first running boom was crude, fun–and for a relative few. Those who were part of the 1970s running scene recall it as “Elmo, a starter’s gun, and a stopwatch.” (Elmo, of course, is Elmo Morales, of Elmo’s T-Shirts on Main Street.) “People didn’t run in the streets” back then, says Morales. “It just wasn’t cool.” So he organized Fun Runs, geared for kids. “I absolutely give Elmo full credit for getting not only me but my whole family into running,” says Tortoise & Hare owner Karen Holappa.

Things got more serious by the late 1970s. Holappa was one of the early Goddesses, whose original purpose was to provide training partners for Goddess coach Lew Kidder’s wife, Karen McKeachie, an elite runner and triathlete, then and now. The Ann Arbor Track Club (AATC) at that time was a relatively small group of very fast runners training seriously for mostly out-of-town pro-am races. Many AATC members also happened to be–or would become–top members of city or county government. Some also ran at lunchtime starting at the Y and did so for many years–though Larry Friedman says he’s the only remaining member of the original group. (He also says he’s now “too old to run fast.”)

Though racing is not for everyone–“it’s where you hurt yourself deliberately,” says Lindeberg–many of the runners I met are always either gearing up for or recovering from a race. Bourque provides both an interesting rejoinder to Lindeberg (“The whole plan is to run so hard it hurts a lot but not so much that you can’t take it”) and a cogent reason for racing: “You find out where you are fitness- and toughness-wise.”

But according to those who know best, while many more are running now, many fewer are running fast. Lew Kidder says that during his tenure as DXA2’s race director (2002-2006), a seven-minute-per-mile pace would earn a top-forty overall finish in a 10K race, whereas “back in the day” it would be “in the middle of the pack at best.” My 37:02 10K personal best (a 5:58 per mile pace, circa 1983), I couldn’t help but notice, would have placed me eighth overall among the 1,832 finishers in the 2011 DXA2 10K, whereas “back in the day” that pace never earned me more than top eight percent.

Mitch Garner, current president of the AATC and a Nasty Boy, is a friend of Frank Shorter, the 1972 and 1976 Olympic marathon champion who’s credited with inspiring running’s rise nationwide. Shorter lives in Boulder, and at Garner’s behest he was in Ann Arbor as the “celebrity runner” at the 2011 DXA2. During a Nasty Boys run the day before the race, Shorter suggested that Ann Arbor and Boulder (which usually ranks high in industry surveys for towns boasting good running cultures) had a similar feel–even if Ann Arbor gets no “official” recognition for its running ambience.

When former Huron High School All-Stater Frank Tinney returned last year following a running career at Princeton and a professional stint with Zap Fitness, he was able to find an exclusive–and “very nice”–group with which to train. Following a successful thirty-five-year career as the U-M men’s track and cross-country coach, Ron Warhurst retired in 2010 and joined forces with the Running Institute, now housed in Running Fit’s west-side headquarters. Three of Warhurst’s U-M middle distance runners competed in the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics 1,500-meter race, including New Zealand silver medalist Nick Willis, who still lives and trains in Ann Arbor–which has caused other elite runners to follow him here. Members of Warhurst’s “Very Nice” Track Club, unofficially named after the coach’s highest compliment, run on Ann Arbor’s streets and trails whenever they’re not competing at the highest levels around the world.

—

The Dawn Patrol women also have created a special running community all their own, but it extends well beyond running and racing.

“There’s something about the effort itself, and the joy of conversation and coffee post-run, that binds us,” says Mary Campbell, referring to the group’s custom of concluding their runs at Sweetwater’s or Zingerman’s, depending on the day of the week.

“Dawn Patrol is a sisterhood,” says Nelda Mercer. “We take care of each other. Some of us are faster, some slower, but we always wait for each other to make sure we are safe.”

I also can sense the love among the Nasty Boys, even as they merely mill around before a run–and even if the way men show affection is by giving each other shit. The guys who used to run with Friedman from the Y told the same stories so often that they finally gave each story a number, and when the number was called it’d get laughs just the same. But it’s no joke that they’ve all stayed so close after so many years. Current Noontime Y runner Phil Ristenbatt says men tend to “open up about the ‘raw’ things in life” while they’re running. And I know that my son often has waited to broach difficult or emotional subjects with me until it’s just the two of us, pounding a lonesome path with nothing but the sound of our own steady breathing to keep us from what matters most.

Lately, though, I’ve liked my runs best when I stop. I used to feel every part of my body when I ran–in a good way. Now I feel every part of my body, but in a bad way.

“Who doesn’t ache with age?” says Amy Kuras–the lone female Noontime Y Runner among a bunch of grizzled guys. But it’s not just that I’m getting older and slower. If I can’t accept the effects of aging, I don’t deserve to age. I just don’t want it to be such a struggle.

This year I attended some speed workouts. I varied my routine and I ran different distances at different speeds at different times. And when challenged by groups that run faster than I would on my own, I’ve kept up–for the most part. So I’ve been able to get a little faster, and at times it’s felt a little more effortless. But still it’s been a struggle.

And maybe that’s because it’s work. Running Fit 501 runner and U-M music professor James Kibbe likens running to playing music because both require discipline–90 percent hard work and 10 percent talent. He’s learned, however, that his students don’t appreciate his running analogies. And I don’t want to hear that stuff, either.

I used to be willing to push myself to the brink, and I suppose that’s what I used to get out of running. But I’m no longer willing to endure pain merely to prove that I can or to feel proud that I survived it. (Although I did throw up after struggling to keep pace with the Nasty Boys during a pre-dawn midweek run in early August. As soon as I felt better, Tony Glinke–whom I knew only from having run with him once before–said, “Let’s finish strong.” And his gentle yet commanding tone had me believing he still believed I was capable of following his order. And for that I was grateful as I finished the last, downhill stretch.)

“What physical pleasure do you derive from running?” I asked Kathleen Gina after a grueling Running Fit 501 run in early August.

“There’s no pleasure; it’s painful,” Gina laughed. “But you need to embrace the pain,” she said. “It carries over into real life. Life’s not easy, either, right? But you endure.”

I met Marty Betts on a Sunday morning trail run, but she’s also one of the early Goddesses and a personal trainer who teaches a class she calls “Learning to Love to Run.” She told me as I tried to follow behind her on a narrow, muddy uphill that while most of her students come to lose weight, “many also find they like it. They actually physically enjoy it. It’s easier for a beginner to see that than it is for somebody who’s been doing it forever”–which is how I felt as she explained it to me.

Ultimately, it was a wise young beginner who provided the most insight. Lisa Huntington started running just a few years ago to help her focus on something other than her recent divorce. When she finished a magazine-prescribed “5 weeks to a 5K race” regimen, she wanted more. She joined Running Fit 501 for running partners and training assistance, and even a fractured pelvis (from which she was still recovering on the morning we ran together) could not diminish her enthusiasm.

“What are you getting out of this?” I asked her.

“A real sense of accomplishment,” she told me. “It makes me feel good throughout the day.”

“But how about this? Right now?” I asked, referring to our trudge up the Broadway Bridge under a scorching sun. My grumbling unabated, she’d finally had it with me.

“No one says you have to run,” she said. And as strange as this might seem, I’d never thought of that before. “You can give yourself permission to stop,” she told me. But weeks later, when my solo running breaks proved indispensable to me as I worked to finish this story–I realized I wasn’t ready to quit just yet.

What I also found–after paying an introductory visit to the Running Institute–is that there’s “something going on” with my arms when I run, as coach Warhurst put it. Apparently, I don’t use them. I’ve started holding my arms higher, but now they get tired when I run. So I’ll be looking into that.

I’ve also become a believer in the power of groups–and I hope that one or more of those I’ve joined temporarily will be willing to take me on as a more permanent member. I’m convinced it’s the only way I’ll find running satisfaction into my old age. Because elderly people–and runners–need partners who don’t mind when they vomit.