caliarch.net

Today I broke the cardinal rule and went for a short run less than two weeks after racing a half-marathon.  I’ve been good and not run all week, but today my legs felt tight and the weather was nice, so I decided to go, with the caveat that it would be a short one, and I would run it at a slow, completely comfortable pace.

For real.  And I did; five miles, slo-o-o-ow, and without panting once.

To be honest, it’s been very hard for me to do that in the last few years.  All the conventional wisdom says that, even when training for a race, only speed, tempo, and pace workouts should be at anything faster than a conversational pace (ie, you should be able to hold a conversation with someone while you’re running), but while I know this, it’s been near impossible to put into practice.  I will try, consciously, to do it, but before I know it I can’t stand it anymore and I’m suddenly running at a much brisker pace.  Why is it so hard?

I do honestly think that part of it has to do with my nature.  I am impatient and I am goal-driven; I live to finish things, all kinds of things, as quickly as possible (which, incidentally, is why timed workouts drive me batty).  While I like to run, I also like to be DONE running, and if I can get it over with more quickly by running faster, why shouldn’t I?

So that’s part of it.  But, reflecting on it today during my first successfully slow solo run in recent memory, it occurred to me that it probably wasn’t a coincidence that this was happening after my race on Sunday.

Backing up–

The race was the first one I’ve trained significantly for in a good, long while, and it’s difficult to complain about holding a steady eight-minute mile for 13.1 of them, given who and what I am (and am not).  Still, it’s hard to forget that for a stretch of years–before knee problems, before joint pain, before asthma flared up again–I was running ten and fifteen miles more or less regularly at a steady seven-and-a-half-minute mile pace, and while I never actually raced a half marathon during that time, *I* know that 13.1 miles for me at that time meant less than 100 minutes.  And secretly, I want that back.  Sure, I’m glad I’m at least back in the ballpark, but to be so close and not pull it off rankles a bit.

But anyway.  I guess what this means is that, in the last few years, I’ve been living with a little bit of insecurity as a runner, wanting to be as fast as I used to be, feeling pretty sure I can be again, but still with the lingering doubts that come from not having objectively proven it on a big clock at the end of a race course.  So, I think sometimes when I’ve been on training runs, it’s hard to run slow because I feel a little bit of a connection between running slow and not being able to run fast.  I’ve felt a NEED to run my long runs at 8 or 8:15 a mile, just to prove to myself I can do it.  To beat back the insecurity a little.

So no, I didn’t break 100 minutes Sunday.  But I got close enough that I feel secure again.  Right now it’s enough to finish in the top 10% for my gender and age group.  Having proved something, at least, makes it a little easier to jog five miles at a ten or eleven minute pace.  No one is judging you, I remind myself; they judged you Sunday, and for now you’re off notice.

I will be back under 100 minutes this year, with any luck.  Until then, I’ll be contenting myself (finally) with those slow, comfy jogs.

…is hearing something awesome in your head and being unable to get it to come out right.  Even after five or six hours of trying.  Listening to things I’ve done in the past made me feel better.

I used to lament, so often, that running wasn’t really feasible in the winter, thanks to the fact that I normally get home from work around 6 and by then it’s already dark.  Add to that the not-all-that-uncommon cold, windy weather and the occasional rainstorm and I was lucky to get out a couple times a month for a run.  Funny; it didn’t occur to me then, but at some point when it was no longer true I realized that in those days I was actually looking for an excuse not to go run a lot of the time.  (Not that I wasn’t sad later about having found them.)

At some point I looked back over a two- or three-month period of this kind of thing and realized, “Shit.  I’ve been on four runs.  That’s barely a load of laundry.”  And that made me sad, because there was no one to blame but me.  Look for excuses, and if you want to find them, you will.  If they’re not really excuses, you won’t let them get in the way of something you really want to do.

One day, while training for a race, a friend of mine mentioned something along those lines that resonated.  It was raining; we’d planned to meet at 9:30 to run, and we’d both admitted to secretly hoping the other would call around 9 to cancel because of the rain.  Neither of us did, though, not wanting to seem like lightweights.  During this conversation, he pointed out to me the power of making yourself do something in the face of something you normally use as an excuse not to do it, like running in the rain.  Do it once, he reasoned, and never again will you ever be able to justify using that thing as an excuse.

I think you also start to recognize excuses for what they are when you truly WANT to go out and run.  This is part of why I sign up for races.  If I know that’s out there, then I HAVE to go run.  I am desperate not to miss a single one, ever, because of what a waste it feels like to run a race you haven’t prepared to do your best in.

It gets interesting when these two things hit simultaneously - honestly, desperately wanting to run, and facing the fact that you haven’t been able to consistently get out there and do it for the last few weeks or months.  So, you get a choice.  Either you accept that you just can’t run as often as you’d like to, or you find ways to stop making excuses.

So I killed them off.  One by one.

“It’s dark.”  If that’s really, honestly, truly a reason not to go running, then I have to accept the fact that I’ll do almost no running in the winter.  That is, winter running = at least some running in the dark.  Also, so what if it’s dark?  This is a city; the place is choked with light pollution.  And if I have to run through an area that doesn’t have the greatest lighting, I have a headlamp.

“It’s cold/windy.”  Again, if that’s really, honestly, truly a reason not to go running, then there will be very little winter running.  Also, they make clothes for that.  In the most dire situations, I have a hat, scarf, and gloves, which I rarely even need once I get warmed up.

“It’s raining.”  Same thing, pretty much.  The thing to remember here is that you’re generally going to be a bit wet while you’re running anyway, so not much sense fretting about that.  And again, wardrobe is key.  I haven’t yet gone the waterproof socks / shoes route, but it is a possibility that’s out there.

“I don’t have the time.”  Over and over again, I find that I DO have the time for what I really want to do.  And, with the exception of longer runs (which generally happen once a week, and then only if I’m actively training for a long race), the truth is that most of my workouts don’t take more than an hour if I’m efficient about it.  Also, juggling workouts across the week can be a useful tool if something unavoidable really does come up.

“I’m really, REALLY tired.”  Well, yeah.  But this is kind of like the winter stuff - if I’m going to say that being tired is an excuse not to run, then I’m going to be canceling a lot of runs.  So I can suck it up (& remember that I’m usually less tired after anyway), or I can accept that I’m going to be running less.

I think that covers most of them.  Finally, having a schedule makes a big difference to me.  I am much more likely to go do something specific that’s written on my calendar on a particular day than I am to keep vague promises to myself about going on some kind of run at some as-yet-unspecified day later this week.  I think it’s because, if I don’t do it (and haven’t actively rescheduled it for another day), I have a sense of having really missed something.

Anyway, those are my tips.  Happy excuse-whacking.

“You need to pay close attention to yourself. The better you understand your true likes and dislikes, the better able you are to make decisions – in work and leisure – that will make you happy. It’s not possible to build a happy life, filled with enthusiasm and engagement, based on the way that you wish you were. For better or worse, we’re all stuck with ourselves.” ~Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project

I think there’s a LOT to unpack there…

“If I want my life to be a certain way, I must be that way myself.” ~Gretchen Rubin; a corollary, apparently, to her Commandment #3, which is to “Act the way you want to feel.”

I have had a long and convoluted relationship with history.  For example, I used to suffer from the delusion that ‘history’ and ‘the past’ were two totally separate things.  In the 8th grade, I used to mime shooting myself in the head on my way to history class; I could see absolutely no value to studying people & events that had been over & done with hundreds of years ago and maintained that it was, without a doubt, ~the~ most practically useless course I was taking.  At the same time, I held an absolutely insatiable fascination with the past; I couldn’t get enough of what my relatives, especially my parents, had been like when they were younger, what relationships had been like & the metamorphoses they’d gone through in the years since then.

History is just a bunch of dessicated laundry lists no one cares about anymore.  The past helps you understand how things got to be the way they are now.

It definitely took me something on the order of seven or eight years to realize that the only difference was one of scale.  My initial conception of things does, however, beg the question about history’s proper place with regard to how we understand the world.

The weird thing about ‘history’ and ‘the past’ is that, with the exception of things that can be proven to have happened or not happened (which, when you think about it, is an astonishingly small number of things), it only really exists in our minds.  Ie, there are plenty of things that I know perfectly well to have happened that no one would ever be able to contradict me about, were I to declare that they hadn’t.  I think about this sometimes with regard to my nephew.  I can still remember my mother’s reaction when she found out my 18 year old sister was pregnant, and how she couldn’t see any way that things would ever be okay again.  I know she gained some consolation from a good friend whose own daughter had gotten pregnant at a young age; looking back at a similar situation some five or six years after the fact, her viewpoint was that my mother’s love for & enjoyment of her grandchild would eventually dwarf the part of history that comprised the circumstances of his conception.

Fast forward to six and a half years later.  My nephew just started kindergarten, my sister is an amazing mother, both are doing great, and our whole family can’t imagine what life would be like without him in the picture.  Every now and then, though, my sister has to deal with what I can only describe as discrimination based on the circumstances of my nephew’s origins.  Whether it’s because she was so young when she had him, because she’s a single mom, or because she was never married to his father in the first place, there’s always someone who will make a judgment based on history, and not the present.

Does this mean we should disregard the past entirely?  No.  But it’s vitally important that we put it in perspective.  Are there facts about what happened seven years ago that are occasionally still relevant in both their lives?  Of course.  Did she make some poor choices?  Probably, and there are plenty of people out there who could learn from them; I know she certainly did.  On the other hand, when she takes her child to the first day of kindergarten like any other mom, does where he came from really matter?  Is her age or marital status important when she takes him to the pediatrician with questions for the doctor?  Unequivocally, no.  And yet, people will still insist on giving weight to history where it just doesn’t deserve it.

On the other hand, this can sometimes be a tricky issue.  I get bogged down in history a lot — not necessarily dwelling on it when it isn’t relevant, but feeling unable, sometimes, to determine whether or not it is relevant.  If X situation seems great now, does it matter that the same people/person & I were once involved in Y situation that made me feel really shitty?  On the one hand, the answer could be no; it could be that the past is the past, and there’s nothing to be gained by flogging a long-dead horse.  On the other hand, there is some inherent value to understanding the past because it helps us understand how we got to where we are, and could be a huge clue about the road we’re currently on and where it’s going.

Even worse is the past you know darn well is utterly useless, and still can’t let go of, like a sore in your mouth that you can’t quick poking with your tongue.  Even when you can see where it’s going, and it’s nowhere good.

…

That’s all I have to say about that right now.

“A truth that’s told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.”

~William Blake

I have to admit that at first, I thought this was one of the cheesiest blogs I’d seen.  But then I actually started reading it.  And it started to remind me, in a sort of eerie way, of some of the thought processes I’ve been through and decisions I’ve made in the past few years.  Now I read it all the time, I guess because I can appreciate what it’s like to not think this way.

Here’s a good example of something Rubin posted that a lot of people could probably benefit from reading — “Ten Myths About Happiness.”  Originally, each myth got its own post, complete with the myth’s source (or at least one source) and descriptions of research and personal anecdotes debunking it.

1)  Happy people are annoying and stupid.

2)  Nothing changes a person’s happiness level much.

3)  Venting anger relieves it.

4)  You’ll be happier if you insist on “the best.”

5)  A “treat” will cheer you up.

6)  Money can’t buy happiness.

7)  Doing “random acts of kindness” brings you happiness.

8)  You’ll be happy as soon as you…

9)  Spending some time alone will make you feel better.

10)  It’s selfish to try to be happier.

Some pretty interesting reading, in my opinion.

Here are the rules:

1 - Go to Wikipedia. Hit “random” or click http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Quotations Page and select “random quotations” or click http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3 The last four or five words of the very last quote on the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to Flickr and click on “explore the last seven days” or click http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

Ex:

“In a politically important moment for the gay community, thongs and theatrics don’t cut it. ”

True?  You decide.  I’m all thunked out for today.