After the awe-inspiring and fantastic Olympics trials this weekend, all I can say is wow.
Where do you even begin, or how do we even start, to unpack everything that went down?
So many stories, so many victories and upsets and surprises — it’s incredible.
shamelessly screenshot from @runwolfpack; Julie, we are all so jazzed for you!
I’m in the throes of the book The Joy of Movement right now, and I find myself nodding my head in agreement and quietly muttering hell yeah! to so much of what author Kelly McGonigal says. There is serious, practically indelible power that arises from people working together, and wow… the marathon, and the Olympic trials in particular, is such a fantastic backdrop to it. The we-agency rolled DEEP!
Who could have ever thought that the simple act of meaningfully moving our bodies — and in concert with someone else — could have such profound, life-altering effects?
forever better when we work together (from last weekend’s meet)
Short on time and sleep at the moment, but more to come next week on the subject (hopefully by then I’ll have wrapped up the book and will have more to say).
Mega congrats to everyone who earned their chance to toe the line last weekend in Atlanta; you make us all so proud!
Ugh, apparently I managed to screw things up on this little corner of the internet last week; it seems that I didn’t save my post (or something), which makes it look like I missed a week of writing for the first time since last summer. Dang! No worries: I just republished (or published for the first time, I guess?) last week’s post, so consider this one a bonus … or something. Anyway. Certainly no one cares about this as much as me.
Training has been going well for Big Sur and Mountains to Beach. I am having a lot of fun and am enjoying the grind. Right now, it doesn’t look like I’ll have a lot of racing opportunities before The Big One — kinda like how it unfolded last year, just due to weekend commitments between now and then — but that’s okay. I’ll figure it out. It’s not the end of the world.
Running can become fairly monotonous if we let it. It’s super easy to run the same routes, and the same paces, at the same times of day, on the same days of the week over and over again. Aside from being boring as hell and predictable (which, unfortunately, is something that we have to think about trying to avoid for fear of creepers and stalkers), that type of running is pretty self-limiting.
That’s not to say that every run needs to be otherworldly awesome and life-changing or anything like that, but there’s something to be said for variety. Different routes, different training partners, different speeds: keeping things spicy can make what can otherwise be a tedious process much more enjoyable (on a completely different level).
all smiles! so happy that the timing worked out and we all ran into each other Sunday morning. The ranger wouldn’t let us in the main entrance, so Plan B it was.
I think that’s why I like marathon training. At its heart, it’s just a lot of running, yes, but it’s also a lot of different types of running. It’s pretty easy to squeeze in a fair bit of variety each week; it’s rare that I repeat myself.
I find all of this extremely liberating. When I don’t run the same thing twice, it’s pretty hard to compare one day’s results to another. It forces me to focus on the run I’m in right here, right now, and completely immerse myself and my energies in it. I used to get so in my own head about my workouts — or really, anything that wasn’t an easy run — and it definitely lessened the enjoyment aspect of training. I was constantly comparing to the shape I was in last year, last month, whatever or the shape I **wanted** to be in. I was afraid that I wouldn’t measure up, and yeah… failure’s not flattering, as NFG reminds us.
These days, all I care about is the run I’m in the throes of doing. It removes the fear element of the equation and replaces it with curiosity and an openness to the experience, which IMHO is far, far more enjoyable and helps make the marathon training process more enriching.
say hello to my non-track track that I use when it’s a nice, sunny day and I don’t want to people-dodge 329782120 people in the park. No fear necessary.
There’s a lot of emotion involved in marathon training, to be sure, but fear needn’t be part of it.
