After watching "Inception" (don't worry, no spoilers!), I thought about finding my own totem. Sometimes my life seems surreal. Sometimes I wish it was, especially during some of my runs. Like my latest attempt at a tempo run (a run where after a brief warm-up, you attempt to run x miles at x pace). I've set my bar WAY too high. A week after coming to terms with the fact that I pay more attention to our vehicle maintenance, another realization has hit me much sooner than it ever has during my sometimes over zealous training: I'm not ready for the speeds I want to run.
Two months ago I broke 20 minutes for the first time in a 5K, a barrier I've seriously pursued for a while. But in the weeks that followed, I went on vacation and paid little attention to my running mileage. Well, I keep a log but kept telling myself that I needed the rest. So I ran fewer times than I ate pancakes for the next month. Then I jumped in head-first and ended up with a strained hip flexor and paying a doctor to cause me serious pain to recover.
Now, the leg feels fine. Somehow I took that to mean my fitness couldn't have possibly suffered. So as I went on my first tempo run in well over 6 weeks, I expected to kick some serious butt. The warm-up mile was fine. The first mile, I was able to keep my pace up for nearly the entire mile before my heart and every other internal organ started to conspire to jump out of my body, wanting no part of this runaway train (OK, I'm not that fast, but don't crush ALL my dreams). As a subscriber to Runner's World's many emails, I get daily running quotes. Many of them have focused on running within yourself. Do you suffer from this too? I set many goals when I run, admittedly, some of them are not within reach. At least not now.
Maybe (and I say that very pessimistically) some of my stubbornness is fading away and I'm doing a little bit of growing up. But at least I'm not growing old.
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