Well this summer has been pretty insane. I got married. I moved. I wussed out in the heat. I gained weight.
I also ran a couple of awesome trail races. I found some beautiful new shoes (review to come). I'm in a good place with my mood and self-worth.
This has been a rough couple of months, but it has been a wonderful couple of months. I am exactly where I need to be and wouldn't change a thing.
If you looked at my MapMyRun profile, you'd see a lot of slower runs and empty weeks. I'm getting better though. This was a 20 mile week for me, so far! They were not my fastest runs, but I ran the whole time. I deliberately went on some hilly courses and some technical(ish) trails to challenge myself. It has been a long time since I've been able to push myself, and risen to my own challenges.
"I'm putting myself first"
Yeah, this is cliche. Like - I would judge someone for actually saying this. It sounds selfish. It sounds like an excuse to abandon other responsibilities. However, I recently needed to realize that I have completely spread myself too thin. With work, moving, getting ready to move again, teaching, writing my dissertation, adjusting to married life, and keeping up an apartment for two all vying for my attention, things started to fall through the cracks. Earlier this summer, even THINKING about running made me feel guilty. I started to realize, however, that the drop in physical activity messed with my metabolism, my sleep cycle, and my ability to focus. A couple of weeks ago, I took advantage of the cool weather and my temporary unemployment to....
"Just start running"
I didn't necessarily want to. But I knew that I didn't feel good, and that when I was running I felt good. So I laced up my sweet Topo Fly-lites and went out for a 3 mile run. While I had gone on little runs characterized by "run a little bit, stop my watch catch my breath, repeat", I made myself keep moving on these runs. I made myself promise that once I started my watch, I would not pause it or stop it until I had finished the mileage that I had set out to run. It paid off.
"Practice makes perfect"
Something that had been pretty discouraging all summer was that my endurance and my pace wasn't as high as it had been all summer. This fall almost none of my runs had been over a 10:00min/mile pace. Now they're almost all over 11:00min/mile. More often for not I would just throw in the towel. "What was the point?" I would find myself thinking. Eventually I was able to step back and say to myself "Yeah, idiot, of course you aren't going to run as fast as you did back then. Of course you won't run as far as you used to. You've been sitting on your butt since March." Even though I didn't particularly want to, I was going to have to revert to my earlier skill level, and work back up to where I had been before.
I'm still building myself back up. I have 9 weeks left until my next race - The Anthem Richmond Marathon. This means that I'm diving right back into the middle of the Hal Higdon training program, and doing a 10-mile run this weekend. Let's see how that goes!
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