The Short Long Run
Week 3 has been challenging. Cold temperatures for my second week of Covid isolation made it really difficult to get my miles in. I had to switch days around in the middle of the week due to the weather, which meant that I didn't take Friday as a rest day before my long run on Saturday. Instead I ran a pretty fast 4 miles.
On Saturday I couldn't finish my long run. I felt like I was running with a weighted blanket around me. I took a lot of walk breaks, and they were longer than usual. At mile 5, even though I wanted to keep going, I decided to head back home in the interest of listening to my body.
Could I have finished the 8 miles? It was probably possible, but it would have involved a lot of walking and might have resulted in an injury or a whole week of crappy runs while my body recovered from the effort. I only made it as far as 5 miles because I was so convinced that I would snap out of the "blerch" if I just kept giving it one more mile. At mile 5 I had to admit that wasn't the case.
There was a weird intensity that I felt around miles 3-5. I've seen it in other runners before and recognized it as unhealthy when they expressed it. It's an insistence that I must do the run even if it doesn't feel right; I can push through anything; literally no excuse is good enough. I'm not quite sure where that came from in me, because I've never felt that way before on a run. As soon as I saw that feeling for what it was, I knew the run needed to be over no matter how much I "wanted" to finish it.
I can speculate on the reasons Saturday was so hard. It was really cold. Even though the weather app said it was 10 degrees with the windchill (which is relatively mild for the winter; I've run in down to -10), it felt much windier and colder than that. I had done a relatively fast mid-length run the day before, which was supposed to be a rest day. I hadn't slept well the night before and was tired before I even set out. I ate eggs but no carbs for breakfast. I probably need to be eating more protein overall and need to start tracking that again. Even though I'm no longer considered contagious, maybe there was still some Covid my immune system was working through.
I've run 8 miles before, and it's at the upper limit of what I can do when I'm not training for anything. Sometimes I'll feel really ambitious and just run 8 miles on a Saturday. So it was very frustrating to not be able to accomplish what felt like a very reasonable goal.
Week 3 Plan
18 total miles of running, broken down as follows.
Sunday: 3 miles
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: HIIT
Wednesday: 4 miles
Thursday: 3 miles
Friday: Rest
Saturday: 8 miles
Week 3 Results
15.3 total miles of running, almost nothing done on the scheduled day
Sunday: 2.59 miles
Monday: Rest
Tuesday: 3.55 miles (no HIIT, Covid)
Wednesday: Rest
Thursday: Rest
Friday: 3.95 miles
Saturday: 5.18 miles
So where does that leave me? There was a meme posted several years ago on a Buddhist Tumblr blog that has stuck with me when things don't go as planned.
Try again, fail again. Try again.
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