It’s weird to have a birthday during a pandemic, when very little about life resembles its normal self. It’s not that I especially care about the pomp and circumstance related to birthdays (though I dig it for my kids), but joyously celebrating one’s birth right now is such a stark contrast to the daily reminders of the sheer amount of death related to this poorly-managed pandemic (over 234k Americans gone now, and with 103k+ cases diagnosed today, a new high).
Why is this still a thing, 34 weeks later?
And yet, how (or maybe why) did so many people willingly elect to have more of the same ineptitude for the next four years?
Whatever the immediate future holds, though, it’s obviously in our best interests to remember to zoom out and look at the entirety of the picture at hand and not simply focus on the pixels closest to our faces. This holds true whether we’re talking about navigating fundamental political disagreements or more pertinent to this blog, about training and racing.
And as sacrilege as it may sound, part of taking the long view includes rest. Yes, rest. As I was reading a NYT parenting newsletter this morning, author Jessica Grose’s words jumped out at me, and her sagacious insight is applicable to a wide swath of our lives right now, whether we’re talking about working during a pandemic (possibly at home, with kids under foot), distance learning-educating at home, or training in such a way, even in the absence of in-person races, to make us feel just a little bit “normal”: “rest up for what lies ahead.”
Rest doesn’t need to be literal rest, though that’s definitely important; instead, I think we can interpret her call as a rallying cry for taking the long view and doing what you need to do, today, every day, for yourself, so that you can show up later. Like most advice, it’s easier said than done.
In this vein, though I’d love to tell you about the past week and about my TT last Saturday morning, I’m heeding her advice and wrapping this up now (and will likely regret publishing this under-developed piece later).
I hope that you are doing whatever you need to do to allow yourself to “rest up” so that showing up later becomes even just a little more manageable.
I can’t be the only one who has figured out a strange but completely doable shelter-in-place lifestyle and rhythm to day-to-day life. It’s not to say it isn’t chaos — some days, all it feels like is chaos — but there’s structure (or structureish) more often than there isn’t. Even with all the weird modifications and restrictions that COVID has inflicted on us and on our day-to-days, I imagine that nearly all of us now have some recognizable pattern to our days (particularly our weekdays).
All of this pertains to running and training, of course. In normal times, many of us (myself included) would be training for something — a race, a mileage or elevation goal, a time trial, whatever. Once COVID upended the racing calendar for the year in what feels like millenia ago, my motivation to run transitioned rather quickly from train hard for a marathon PR to train for life for the foreseeable future.
the nice thing about running just ‘cuz is that it allows you to enjoy your surroundings
Stay healthy, leave the house every single day, do something for myself (and thus, for my family): it was enough of a motivator to help get me out the door every single day since early March. Admittedly, sometimes going out for another ol’ training run “for life” isn’t — wait for it! — super exciting. (shocker, right)
(Quick aside to note that absolutely, yes, of course I’m grateful for every single mile I can run and for any time I get to spend outside. My privilege isn’t lost on me; I’m just being brutally honest that sometimes going for a run just ‘cuz I can isn’t all that exciting).
I joke that most of my 2020 miles have been of the vanilla variety (see that whole training for life thing) and that my speeds are slow and slower. I have no qualms signing up for virtual races and challenges because I want to support the race businesses whose events I’d usually be running, but I have zero desire to virtually race race in the absence of the actual thing. If you can, kudos. That’s (really) hard.
Well, not that we’re necessarily turning a corner on this year or anything — COVID is still ravaging communities and families all over the world, my kids are in DL for the foreseeable future, C’s remote for the foreseeable future, I have no future travel plans to see my family on the other side of the country (which really stings), and so on — but it’s time for a change, at least pertaining to my running.
Nothing wild here, just some good, ol’ fashioned work sprinkled in between all the vanilla. Spicy stuff, a different type of variety than what I’d usually get in marathon training: hill sprints, mile effort repeats, shorter distance TTs, mid-run pick-ups, routine end-of-run strides, that type of thing. The variety is sufficiently engaging to leave me feeling excited about the opportunity (a new stimulus!) yet still minor enough, in the grand scheme of my weekly volume, to not leave me feeling antsy and worried about whatever ridiculous reason I can conjure to justify said unnecessary worrying.
When you haven’t been running fast for a while, the bar is pretty low, and expectations are virtually non-existent. Honestly, it’s pretty refreshing.
Last week, in ARP, on one of the paved closed-off-to-cars roads, I did hill sprints up a hill that was about a half-mile long, at what was supposed to feel like 5k effort, for like 60 seconds at a time. For someone like me who feels much more at home in the marathon than in a 5k, two things immediately stood out to me. First: throwing down 5k pace mid-run anytime is usually a bit startling, often leaving my legs and body feeling completely blindsided as to what in the world just happened. Second: the absurdity of even the mere idea of trying to run fast and hard up a hill is hilarious — like how is this supposed to work?!?! Doesn’t one of these cancel out the other???
All of this said, let me be the first to tell you that hill sprints, even partially up a long-ass hill, is also really freaking fun. See the aforementioned honestly, it’s pretty refreshing commentary.
Earlier this week, I hopped on a track for some fast running for the first time in … months? A year? Maybe more? Hard to know. At any rate, I spent very little time there, relative to the rest of my run, but if I initially thought that last week’s hill sprints were absurd, let me tell you the one about the marathoner whose coach tasked her to go run timed repeats at mile (!) effort pace. 0_o
Fortunately, the repeats were short enough (45 seconds, 3 times/set, with 1 minute recovery between each rep, and 3 minutes recovery between the 2 sets), but again, when you’re used to going at slow or slower paces, trying to hit mile paces is akin to jumping in the coldest water you can find and reacting accordingly.
Again, however: it’s a blast.
It’s hard work for sure, and we’re just getting started on this new project, but it is a refreshing reset and just enough variety to diminish some of the vanilla that has been my running of late.
Also fun fact: I don’t think I’ve run a timed mile since middle school. (I took PE in high school during summer school, and I don’t recall having to run a timed mile then). Suffice it to say that I’ve been out of middle school for many, many (many) years.
What does all of this have to do with COVID-19, next week’s presidential election, or any of the many other dumpster fires raging right now that I’ve been bantering about in this space for the better part of the last 33 weeks? I could probably devise some sort of tenuous connection, but for simplicity’s sake, it doesn’t, really.
So many people have discovered (or re-discovered) intentional movement during shelter-in-place — whether that’s running, walking, hiking, run/walking, walk/running, or any other combination of propelling yourself in a generally, more-often-than-not, forward direction — and it’s fantastic. Few things make me happier than to see people taking care of themselves by doing any of the aforesaid.
Keep going, friends, doing whatever it is that you’re doing to stay well during this super challenging time, and especially as we’re going into the typically more-illness-prone winter and colder months, do everything in your power to stay healthy.
And when you need to break out of the vanilla, consider something as simple and child-like as moving fasterevery now and then.
It may be the last thing you’d ever think of doing on your own, but it could be juuuuuust enough of a stimulus that it becomes the new thing to which you look forward each week.
Ditch the expectations of how you think it ought to be, stay in the interval and focused on the work at hand, and keep going in such a way that next time will be better.
Maybe the connections aren’t so tenuous after all.
