Farewell Dear Toenails

Tis the season to make New Year’s resolutions, and I have some fairly straight forward running-related goals for 2012. First, the fun one: do a couple running-related vacations with fellow running friends, new and old. Usually vacation requires sneaking away from family to run or blatantly rejecting invitations to happy hour in order to squeeze in a few miles.  Wonderfully, during running vacations the most complicated decisions are choosing a post-race restaurant or what Oiselle outfit to wear around town.

Now for the ‘serious’ ones. I recently read Brad Hudson’s Run Faster, and it encouraged me to look back through my 2011 training log. It was horrifying.  Crazy mileage jumps and subsequent plunges, poor recovery, overambitious workouts, and injuries all peppered my journal. Not pretty.  But I got away with it (sort of).

Resolution #1:  Stick to a weekly workout schedule that has BUILT IN recovery time.   I know this seems pretty fundamental, but I when I start to see improvements I get too excited and try to train myself into the ground.

Resolution #2: Quit mileage leaping (this goes with Res. #1).  All too often in my 2011 training, I tried upping miles AND workout intensity at the same time. Without fail I turned into zombie version of myself and limped around pathetically.  This was usually accompanied by a craving for brains. So what’s the take home message? Hover at a solid mileage so that when I train for marathons I’m not increasing continually throughout the training cycle.

Resolution #3: As a culminating goal: don’t hurt myself during Boston training! Sounds easy enough, right?

So why am I bidding my toenails adieu? Running solid mileage (continually) through a year means my ‘normal-looking’ toenail rate can drop as low as 20%. 

So it begins

It is finally time to start a running blog!  Ironically, it begins during a running hiatus, thank you to an overuse injury to my back a few weeks ago. BUT, as always, injury is a time to re-evaluate, re-charge, -re-focus, and reassess. Big questions have been swirling through my mind:

Why do I run? Who am I when I’m not running? How did I let my life get so out of balance that without running I feel like some lost soul wandering through my days?

Since I’ve had several weeks to mull over these questions, I did some serious thinking and got answers, some of which were somewhat startling.

Q: Why do I run?

A:  I like to push myself and test my limits, and running is an ‘easy’ way to do that.  It is difficult to train hard (eating, sleeping, and training right all take lots of time and effort as we all know). Also, it’s mind-clearing, energy-boosting (usually), blood-pumping, and FUN!

Q: Who am I when I’m not running?

A: Well, less tired.  I also have a desire to create art when I’m not running as much. It’s almost as though I have a drive to run, or I have a drive to make art, but I can’t have both at the same time. Besides the perplexing creative/running conundrum, I am science-lover.

Q: How I let my life get so out of balance that without running I feel like some lost soul wandering through my days?

A: This is by FAR the hardest question. I have a tendency to put my training over everything, in an unhealthy, hermetic kind of way.  I put so much emphasis on running that it was weighing down one side of the imaginary teeter-totter of mind-energy. But, the answer looming behind what I thought was just overly solitary behavior was this:  One reason I love running is because I feel like I’m practicing self-discipline…but I was secretly taking the easy road. 

That might sound odd, because running does take self-discipline, but I was avoiding a much more difficult self-discipline: being patient, helping others, being generous, and on and on. Running was making me really selfish! I let myself get lazy with ‘true’ self-discipline and used running as a surrogate.

There. I said it. Now it's time to change those habits!