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Signs

Signs

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Running is so weird. Last week I wrote about how I bailed on my cutback 16-mile LR because I just felt sub-meh, so instead of grinding through it, I ran for less than an hour before coming home and getting some additional rest. I felt like I was making the right decision, given the bodily feedback I had, but admittedly, it’s still hard sometimes when my head and heart are pulling me in different directions. 

Well, after that bailed long run, on Sunday I ran the longest and farthest of this training cycle, and it felt better than I hoped it would. I figured I’d run about 26-27, maybe around 5-6 hours, and that’s pretty much exactly how it ended up: 26.5, 5:39, and just under 5,000’ of climbing. My goal was less as fast as possible and more along the lines of time on feet and dial-in the fueling for race day. I’m pretty happy with how it went, overall, and how I felt. 

It was a weird beginning though, for sure, and something that I keep revisiting. I’ve found myself thinking about John a lot more recently, rest in peace. My guess is that it stems from last week’s Chicago Marathon because more often than not, he ran it (and Stacey would jump in for a bit), and we’d all text and email after the fact and celebrate the victories and bitch about the heartaches and/or the weather. 

In the off-chance that he didn’t run it, John always offered colorful commentary about his observations of the race after the fact, mutual friends whom he saw (or didn’t see, curiously), that sort of thing. These text or email exchanges were a given every second Sunday in October.

It was weird to have a Chicago Marathon weekend come and go and not hear from him. 

rest in peace. (Chicago, summer ’19)

Anyway. As it is for a lot of people, for me, sometimes the hardest part of any given run is the first couple miles or, before that, simply getting out the door in the first place. I didn’t start my long LR on Sunday until dawn, around 6:45, so I wouldn’t have to wear a headlamp unnecessarily for hours. In the first 20 or so minutes, I was cycling through periodic mental soliloquies, wondering why I was doing this in the first place, thinking of all the other things I could be doing at that moment, trying to remember why I thought doing a 50k again was a good idea … typical beginning-of-LR mental banter when I’m by myself.

And then: BOOM. Shortly after I began running, the most brilliantly colored sky stopped me in my tracks. By myself, in the pre-dawn Sunday morning, I involuntarily let out an audible ohmygod for no one to hear but me. The colors were so unusual and so unlike what I see at this time of year that seeing them where and when I did stopped me dead in my tracks. I didn’t stop to take a picture because I just wanted to experience it, myself, right then and there. 

I haven’t been running in the early mornings much anymore, save for the weekends, so maybe that affected my visceral response. Maybe the pre-dawn/blue hour skies are always that color at this time of year, and I just haven’t seen it lately to notice. The best I could remember, though, was that that type of sky — filled with those types of hues — is something that I usually don’t see until the early morning runs in the winter. (It’s part of the reason why winter running is always my fav season, even when I lived in Chicago). 

Left to my own devices — and responsible for getting myself through the next five-or-so hours of running and climbing — I decided that this brilliant sky was an auspicious beginning to this run, the same run for which not all that long ago I was feeling a bit of trepidation.

Hell, maybe this sunrise was even a sign from John that this run would be fine, that I got this. 

I realize that thinking that John was “sending” me a message from “the other side” sounds a bit crunchy, even for me, but I couldn’t shake the feeling. So fast, within the first 20 minutes of my run, before I began the hard-hard work, my emotions catapulted from trepidation/gritting-teeth realism to thinking that I got this, it’s fine, it’s nothing I haven’t done before. The transition was quick and breathtakingly dramatic. 

And then. Right as I was about to enter the park, after twenty minutes of chiding myself for thinking that John somehow sent me a brilliant, seemingly-rare sunrise, I noticed a sleek fox bolting out of someone’s yard and quickly trying to hide away in the woods.

It’s rare for me to see foxes at or near the park — in the almost-eight years I’ve been running there, I can probably count on one hand how many I’ve seen — and it got me thinking about John, again. Foxes no doubt are in the park and in the surrounding area, living right under our noses, but most of the time, we don’t see them; that’s how they survive, by flying under the radar more often than not.     

John was that type of friend to a lot of people. You always knew he was there, that he was around, but a lot of the time, he chose to fly under the radar. He never wanted attention on himself. The thought of anyone lavishing praise or attention on him for anything, no matter how noble or amazing or great his accomplishment was, would make him cringe. (This even came up in his funeral service). 

Maybe it’s weird to proclaim that an unseasonable, brilliantly-colored sunrise and then an elusive, almost-invisible fox in a twenty-minute timeframe, at the outset of a killer long run — one that I felt uneasy about from the get-go — made me think of my deceased friend and training partner, whom I miss dearly, but it did. 

For the next five hours and change, my thoughts kept returning to our friendship that spanned over a decade-plus. 

Even when the run got hard, or I got tired, or whatever, the momentary challenges were eclipsed by a sense of gratitude and calm, a feeling of genuine happiness to be out there and doing what I was doing. 

Not going to lie: it was amazing. It was a run that I’ll definitely bottle. 

about 9 in

the totality

the totality

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Dang, what a weekend and a Monday! 

Between Sunday’s hot Chicago Marathon (been there, done that, a few times over – it sucks, but dang, ya’ll are tough for finishing in the swampy and toasty temps!) and then Monday’s hopefully one-off Boston Marathon on the second Monday in October (not the third Monday in April), just as I said in last week’s entry, it sure is hard not to feel all jazzed right now with all things running. 

Of course, that doesn’t mean that everyone had great races so far this fall or even that everyone is hitting their training runs out of the park; certainly not. Running is far too mercurial, far too flaky for that. All most of us can do is hope that on the day when we decide that it matters most — typically, race day — that all the pieces fall into place and that we can effectively control All That We Can. We can only do so much. It sucks — truly, deeply, blows — when race day doesn’t materialize in the way that we’ve envisioned it for weeks (months, years), and it sure stings like hell in the immediate aftermath, especially when we’ve pored All That Is Available From Our Buckets into the race, our goals, and the experience. 

(goes without saying, but yeah, been there, done that, a million times over)

The same goes for training runs, too. Not everything feels miraculous or even goes necessarily all that well; I think most runners would say most of their runs are decent. Nothing more, nothing less. Just fine.

It’s hard not to put a lot of hope (or despair) at the heels of our training runs — that is, it’s hard not to get excited when things are clicking more often than not, and it’s also hard not to despair when quite the opposite is happening. Our best performances are a teeny, tiny blip in time. So it is for our worst (or our sub-par) performances. It doesn’t necessarily account for the totality of the running and training experience. 

We can have extraordinary training and a pretty crappy race day. 

We can also have a rough go of a training cycle and surprise ourselves on race day. 

The unpredictable nature makes all of this really frustrating and really, strangely exciting and attractive. 

Putting in the work as best as we can, and then throwing the dice and seeing where it all lands on the day, is reason enough for so many of us to keep showing up over, and over, and over again, no matter how distorted our heartache-to-happiness ratio is. 

Last week was a planned down week in my 50k training, the first in quite a long while, and I couldn’t shake this off-feeling that I had pretty much all week long. I wondered if it was because it was the week after my kids were off school for fall break, and in our off-week, we all had tried to sleep in as much as we could all week long, so naturally last week we’d probably be feeling a bit groggy as we recalibrated to our normal schedules. That made sense. 

I thought maybe it was because I had several consecutive nights of volunteer obligation meetings, some several hours long, and that, in combination with the aforementioned, was making me feel like I was digging myself into a hole I couldn’t get out of. 

Or hell, maybe it was all related to the previous week, almost like a delayed-onset fitness adaptation, wherein the week before I had run and climbed a whole bunch and so maybe last week my body was finally absorbing the totality of it. That also made sense.

Who knows? Maybe it was all of it; maybe it was none of it; maybe it was some weird combination to which only the running gods and goddesses themselves are privy. 

I just know I felt really meh, sub-fine for most of my runs last week and ultimately even bagged my 16 mile cutback LR over the weekend five miles into it (after pushing it from Friday to Saturday, and then again from Saturday to Sunday), just because I felt so crummy. Weird, right? 

This week at least, so far, so good (though I’m still sleeping a bit more than usual. Good for my recovery efforts, bad for my 60’ I usually spend with the NYT and my tea and breakfast before waking up the kids).  

My point is that when it comes to looking at people’s race performances on the day or their training, I don’t think any one day is IT when it comes to predicting success (or that similarly, success isn’t predicated on runners doing one specific thing in training). Having a breakthrough marathon or a really strong workout isn’t entirely dependent on one specific long run you did or the one day you fuelled and slept like a boss. It’s the totality that matters. 

As humans, I think we tend to want to simplify life as much as possible — especially these days, with the additional stresses that COVID has thrown into all of our lives — but I’m guessing that realistically speaking, it’s the sum of our best efforts that will help scootch us along toward realizing our goals, whatever they are. 

At earlier points in my decade-plus of doing this long distance stuff, I have absolutely no doubt that my last week’s training and non-absolute-subscription to my training plan would have mentally derailed me and made me count myself out of my race before I ever stepped foot anywhere near the starting line (hell, I’m not even in race month yet!). These days, fortunately, with a lot more experience under my belt and a lot of sagacious insight from some incredible friends and mentors in the sport, I know that last week was but a blip. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

If you’re in the throes of training for something and have similarly experienced a “non-adherence event” to your training plan for whatever — barring injury or catastrophe — it’s ok! The relative success of your future race isn’t hinged on the one time things went sideways. 

You’ve got this. Keep grinding! 

4 weeks and change