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Tempering

Tempering

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More often than not, I tend to ramble on about The Process — capitalization for emphasis, clearly — with marathon training and the inherent joy and challenge of going through it and coming out on the other side. The Process, the grind, the daily showing up when you don’t always feel like it for whatever real or perceived reason, is part of how we grow as athletes and as human beings. It’s that whole “if it were easy, everyone would be doing it” thing. 

Knowing all that, I tend to hold tight to the value of fairly low expectations for myself. I may have a very vague idea of what I could possibly do on any given day, but it’s exceedingly rare that I go into a race, a workout, or even just a plain ol’ training run with an abundance of confidence about what’s going to happen. Will I fail spectacularly? Will this all go over without a hitch? No idea either way. Won’t know unless (and until) I try. 

That’s a good enough reason, most of the time, to get me out the door to see what’s possible.

I was thinking about all this stuff recently, after my eldest’s swim meet over the weekend and after reading this article from Matt Fitzgerald about his upcoming 100k. I can’t pretend to know what must be running through Matt’s head as he attempts his longest race ever, with a lot of extenuating circumstances that hamstrung his training and his ability to have a minimal-suffering race. His attitude is awesome though — show up, be there for it, and just see how it goes — and this characteristic is one that I’ve been trying mightily to foster in my own approach to my training. 

My eldest’s meet over the weekend also got me thinking about this stuff because she raced very well for her with what I’m pretty sure were fairly non-existent expectations. Of late, she has been drawn to the 500 (500!!) freestyle and has been racing it as often as it’s available in competition; they also fairly routinely do it during practice each week, too. She had been sitting at a certain time for the past 3 or 4 attempts, plus or minus a couple seconds, and she seemed really satisfied by it and happy with the consistent effort she had been putting out. On Sunday though, she took off a solid 20 seconds from her time — 20 seconds! — and when I told her her finish time after she hit the wall (the wall is good to hit in swimming…not so much in running, I know), she was FLOORED, so happy she was nearly in tears. She probably never thought she could do that, or make that huge a jump … until she did. 

radiating joy

As her mom and as an athlete, it was such a joy to witness her realization firsthand.

It is comparably joyful to see how she has become attuned to the beauty of The Process and to watch it unfold night after night at practice and week after week at meets. 

Tempering our high-achieving standards for ourselves with a heaping dose of humble pie, and who knows what will happen? It may not be so bad.

It may, in fact, be far sweeter than we could have imagined. 

the wonder that is the body

the wonder that is the body

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When you stop to think about it, our bodies are pretty magnificent. It’s a small wonder that they don’t malfunction more often than they do (luckily for us), but of course, when they do, it can be (understandably) pretty catastrophic. When we really scrutinize and dissect everything that goes into making us, well, us, it’s all pretty inconceivable. 

pretty sure I’m thinking less about my body here and more about this huge gradient ahead of me (PC: J)

We know so much, and yet there’s still so much that we don’t know or can’t replicate. It’s amazing.   

It’s on my runs that I often think about this stuff, about everything that must be going on in my body, at that very instant, in order for me to alternate one legged hops and (generally speaking) propel myself forward without eating shit in the process. Of course, I certainly don’t even know the half of what’s going on internally, physiologically speaking, which speaks to the magnitude of the machine that is the human body. 

other magnificent entities: sunrises

Easy runs, hard runs, it’s all relevant here because our bodies have to successfully do so much in order for us to a) generically speaking, move and b) more specifically, perform. 

Being a couple weeks into marathon training mode has brought all of this to the forefront of my mind, since all my runs are no longer more or less the same volume or intensity as they were in the past six months. With marathon training, given the typically-high intensity and volume of each week and each month, it’s so important to keep easy days easy, hard days hard, and the like so you can appropriately (and adequately) stress your body in the right way on the given day.   

A lot has to go on over the course of successful marathon training — strictly in the physiological realm, though in everywhere else, too — to give us a fighting chance of being able to show up on The Big Day and execute on The Big Goal. It’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking that only workout days and long run days matter in training — that all the other easy or aerobic miles are purely junk — but man, I don’t think that could be further from the truth. Everything matters. 

Good training is more than just the sum of its smallest parts; it’s when everything is working in concert that the magic can happen.   

My worlds are colliding a bit because it was just in the past week that my library order for Bill Bryson’s The Body: A Guide for Occupants finally came in after a couple months of being waitlisted. It has been a long time since I’ve been in a science class — women’s health, circa 2005? maybe? — so my armchair knowledge of advanced biology is rusty, at best.  Still, I can assure you that this book is captivating and has often left me at the end of each chapter with a new-found appreciation — or a reminder to appreciate in the first place — all my various bodily components. (I’m only about 30% through the book, so while I can’t yet speak of the book in its entirety, I can at least say that what I’ve read is quite amusing and entertaining, due to Bryson’s wry style, and is almost dizzyingly informative). 

It has also been within the past week that my kids and husband (and consequently, I) got turned onto a newish Netflix series called “Cells at Work!” It’s an anime series that anthropomorphizes each component of the cell (think white blood cells; red blood cells; all manner of bacteria and viruses, like meningococcal, pneumococcus and staphylococcus cells; platelets; phagocytes; you get the idea). Again: worlds colliding.

It sure is easy to always have the body on the brain when most everything you’re reading or watching in your spare time is on the subject. 

So what’s my point? To be honest, I’m not really sure I have one. Sometimes what I love most about running is that it reminds me how small and insignificant I am in this great big universe as it puts everything — absolutely everything — into perspective. Having the recent reminders about the complexity that is human life has given me pause to periodically take a metaphorical step back, zoom out, and simply observe, take care, and be grateful. 

grateful

You don’t need to log a bunch of miles or ratchet up your heart rate to come to that conclusion, but you may find — as millions of others often do and can attest — that doing so yields greater clarity than you can ever imagine.