The more I run, the more I feel humans are wondrous.
(Post-race comment by Tsuyoshi Kabaruki, runner-up in the 2016 Ultra Fiord, a 100mile race through Patagonia, and considered by many to be the world's toughest ultra marathon.)
Something has definitely changed...
As usual, I awoke on long-run day already, as if by habit, searching for excuses. Also, as usual, it was a pretty simple matter to find them without even leaving my bed: I was still tired; it had been a hellish week, and I was at risk of over-training. Then a wave of confirmation affirmed the excuses I had already found: I had covered plenty of kilometres already this week; this should be a step-back week anyhow; and the trump card, my feet, knees and left hip hurt.
Still, feeling a little uncomfortable not with the pain, but at the ease with which my mind dreams up these feeble excuses, I arose and eased my way into the day. There was no particular rush this morning, so I was able to give myself time to more properly assess these reasons not to run that I'd woken with. Strangely and unusually I felt an underlying wave of confidence building, pushing aside the excuses as mere jokes, which really is all they were.
Breakfast consisted of left-over vegetables with a little melted cheese and some tarragon, a regular favourite meal of mine since quitting bread nearly six months ago. And then, quite unusually for me, I simply put on my running shoes and got on with it. I didn't think about it anymore, and I paid no heed to my achy knees and the odd, deep-seated pain in my left hip that comes and goes. I ran, and it was dead-set easy for all but the last half hour, which was genuinely but not overwhelmingly difficult. The pain in my knees and hip grew no worse, which was heartening. Even more heartening was the distance; a useful 25.5km which has me still on track for a 200km month, and gets the tricky long run out of the way in the difficult six-work-day week.
With my next race still eight weeks away, this is all simple base-building mileage, completed at no great pace and with little pressure, other than that supplied by my inbuilt excuse finding facility, usually at its most active upon waking in the morning. The relative ease of these runs conceals a hidden benefit: the rapidly growing endurance created by low heart-rate running which develops aerobic fitness with little risk of injury. The pain and soreness I felt this morning is only minor, and normally not worth even mentioning. It's certainly less pain than I feel with more regular, high-intensity training, and with greater distances covered and far more time spent in training.
There's a sort of high-fiving celebration going on inside of me just now. On the surface I appear merely satisfied; after all, these distances I'm covering are as nothing compared to serious athletes. But I know that for me it represents something far more significant, and inside I'm celebrating. At 55 years of age, I'm daring to think the previously unbelievable: that just perhaps it is actually possible that my best years of running are yet ahead of me.
Whether that's true or not, I intend to find out.
March Too Much
