Tricks and Perseverance

I reminded myself all day to go running and to make a Running Commentary post.  Regular readers may recall, that is one of my tricks to get myself to run after a long, tiring day at work: remind myself all day to do it so it will be automatic and I won’t talk myself out of it.  Sometimes I have to ask myself, how can I keep saying I love to run when it is so damn easy to talk myself out of it?  One day perhaps I will take a whole blog post to discuss the matter.  For today, let us just accept it as true.

So I accomplished the first part of my plan: I ran. Now I am attempting to accomplish the second.  As I type this, it is more than two hours after I finished my run.  Ideally, I do not wait that long.  In fact, after I finished the run, I thought, “That was a dull run.  I’m not going to write about that run.”  Well, two hours later and no other blog post in sight, I am going to write a little bit.

I am slowly working back into running after my week-long pause following the East Herkimer Fire Department 5K (just thought I’d plug them again).  When I ran on Saturday, I managed 27 minutes.  Here is how I decided to run 27 minutes:  I seemed to remember that there is a Turkey Trot 5K somewhere around here on Thanksgiving Day.  I thought I might like to run it.  I further thought, to be really comfortable running it, I would like to run for 40 minutes the previous Saturday.  Then I counted backwards from Saturday Nov. 18, if I was adding 10 percent to my run time each week, what I should run Oct. 21 to get to 40 minutes by then?

I often figure simple math in my head when I run.  It is another trick I use.  Back in Army Basic Training, when I learned to run, Drill Sergeant Dillinger told me that the secret to running is to distract yourself, so you don’t think about how much it sucks to run.  I later found out that it does not always suck to run, something I never would have learned without the distract yourself trick.

Getting back to today’s run, part of it was fairly sucky.  I have been working on my feet for the past two days; my legs and feet are TIRED.  However, as I have mentioned many times: I know how to persevere.  Eventually my leg muscles began to feel more supple. My feet were still not best pleased with me, but you’ll have that.  I reminded myself that I do not have any place I have to go nor anything I have to get done this evening.  No need to recruit my energies!  I could just go ahead and BE tired!

And, yes, obviously I did have one thing to get done this evening:  make my daily blog post.  And, look at that.  I just did.  Ha! In your face!  I say that to my inner critic, not my dear readers.  To my dear readers I say, thank your tuning in.