Running through the dogged days
Remember when I said that fits and starts were OK, but I hoped for more starts than fits? The only start I got was on a long downhill slide to nearly no running. The more embarrassing it got, the less I wanted to share with you how poor my performance was becoming. Poor performance begets stage fright (blog fright?).
May seemed like a return to proper form, but it was the beginning of letting go of goals that were barely attainable before my shingles outbreak robbed me of drive and good health for much of February and March. The “original” penciled-in goal of 170 miles in May, now officially ludicrous, got toned down to 85 miles, just half of the original plan. I could try and extend the long runs and increase the frequency of shorter support runs.
That didn’t happen. Although I managed three runs of 8 miles and one of 8.8 miles, they never got longer. The short and medium runs were too few and far between, too. I never ran more than 20 miles a week, finishing May with 69.6 miles and a mere 12 days run out of 31. The 4 longest runs were 47% of the total mileage, a figure that I think should be between 25 and 35 percent in a good month.
June was worse- I ran 11 days and just 40.5 miles run. My longest run was 5.6 miles. My fastest run was at 12:29 pace and that was at Brick Reservoir where I had been trying to speed/interval workouts not so long ago. In my defense, allergies and heat and humidity affected my ability to even get out the door, let alone try to stretch my endurance or pick up the pace. Looking at the calendar page, it is easier to forget how hard I was trying once I was out there and beat myself up for all the empty days with no running in them. But, of course-
July was EVEN WORSE. I didn’t set any goal, figured I’d see how I felt, how things went. I felt bad; things went badly. I got out 7 days of “running” and a whopping 23.8 miles. Again, I have finished three marathons, so a MONTH with less than 26.2 miles is galling to me. The heat seemed hotter. I even chopped off my long curly hair mid-month to no affect whatsoever.
After 7 months I’ve covered a grand total of 366.1 miles. Out of 213 days, I ran 75 of them. Twenty of those were in January, back when I stupidly cursed the cold weather and the dry air.
Here we are in the dog days of August, hoping for a seabreeze or a solid cold front to sweep down from Canada. I’m trying to get over a head cold that had been going around, a cold I would have shrugged off like a good carrier should and run straight through it to burn it out of me in better days. I tried running today despite it being 85 degrees (a dry heat) but it turns out that while my head cold may have cleared, nobody told my lungs about it. So I wheezed my way through about a quarter-mile of jogging on the bike path near my home before I stepped into some soft sand and rolled my ankle.
It would have horrified onlookers, but since squirrels don’t count, I’ll describe it for you. I wobbled on my left arch, then as my weight came forward, my foot suddenly rolled over onto its side and made way for the left side of my left ankle to carry the weight of my whole body coming down on it. Know what happened next? Hardly anything because this was the third or fourth time I’d done it in my life. I stopped for about 30 seconds to make sure it was good. I put all my weight on my left foot, slooooowly stood up on my left toes. Then I started running again. That’s what cross-country runners do if they aren’t really hurt, even the junior varsity. After about 10 minutes, though, my body remembered my more-recent illnesses and conditions and made me walk back home, sweating like Patrick Ewing and coughing like a more socially-acceptable Aqualung, the poor old sod.
The dog days can play havoc with order. Lately, I’ve been trying to find my drive to run. Clearly, it was misplaced along with my drive to blog about it. I misplaced my priorities for sure. Some days it is hard to make time for the things you love to do, to keep them from becoming things you USED TO love to do. When I can’t make time, I make do, or I make excuses. I think we all do. I know that I have a passion for running and writing and many other aspects of life. I also know passion can run deep and silent even when devotion and discipline take a powder. But it never really goes away, does it? Eventually you have to devote the bulk of your time to who and what you love; make time for all the other stuff. I’m trying, in my own life, to redefine the categories of “wanna”, “hafta”, and “sposta”. Soon enough, the dog days will end.
Tags: blogging, distance, dog days, endurance, health, injury, jogging, motivation, running, shingles
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