This past week was spent recovering from an illness of some sort. I’ve been congested and tired since the weekend in Baltimore and running far less than I’d intended. Instead of an “easy” 20 mile run on Sunday to round out a low-mileage week, I ran three. Not the performance I’d been hoping for.
It is hard to quit on a run without feeling like a quitter. It’s hard to tell yourself that taking a break for a couple of days is the best move in the long run, when you know that the ability to push through and finish runs you don’t want to finish is critically important come race day. Toeing the line between being tough and being smart isn’t something I’m particularly good at, since being tough usually feels great and being smart usually feels awful, since you’re sitting there thinking you should be running.
As Paul Flannery put it a few weeks back in Running Probably:
“The highs had been impossibly high. There were monster breakthroughs and solid evidence of real training adaptations that had eluded me for years. Yet, the lows were awfully low: injuries, self doubt, and frustration. To put it another way, I’ve spent as much time not running the last few weeks as I have putting in the miles. That’s a lot of extra time to think.”
But there is always a silver lining, and in the case of my botched Sunday long run, that meant choosing to spend time with friends and family over grinding through miles for no reason. Plus, it meant choosing this massive steak (and associated late night) over a good pre-run meal and solid night of sleep:
Some choices get made for you.
Now I’m in Maine this week and just getting back into it. I’ve run six miles a day since Tuesday and have a big weekend ahead of me, with 20 miles on Saturday and 30 on Sunday. It’s hilly around here, so I am preparing myself to go slow and for my thighs to feel like jelly by the time all is said and done. But a good weekend of training can do a lot to put the last two weeks of blah-ness behind me.
Will check in next week to let you all know how it went!