I finished nine straight weeks of mile training last week, culminating in a mile that was…not very fast (in fact, 10-15 seconds slower than the baseline mile I started with!). I learned a couple things:
- I don’t love running at the upper end of my speed range. The feeling of almost being unable to go on, even if I can technically go on, is so unpleasant that I can’t believe people like and routinely train for medium-short distances like the mile or the 800 (even the 400 can be such a minkfuck). It’s brutal, and I want to spend as little time as possible in that state.
- My mental game is absolutely the weakest part of whatever I have going on, especially at short distances. I was really, really working on mental strategies to get myself through my workouts and the race itself, and way more often than not, I mentally tanked. I basically had the yips.
- You’d don’t have to do what you don’t want to do. This is a lesson for which the opposite is also true (you do have to do what you don’t want to do), and maybe which side of the lesson we need to learn alternates throughout our lives. After this training block, I definitely needed to learn (relearn, for the millionth time) that you don’t have to do what you don’t want to do. A friend—a very speedy and goodhearted friend—offered to pace me through a track mile after my race didn’t pan out how I wanted, because she knew I could do better. And my first impulse was that I had to say yes—I needed to conquer the mile! I should be able to run a fast mile! I had it in me! You should say yes to hard things! Push yourself! But hey. HEY. I had just spent nine weeks pushing myself, and I was getting wound up so tight about paces and mental toughness and the pain cave (LOL given my 6:30 mile goal pace) I was at risk of spontaneously combusting. I just didn’t want to run at mile pace anymore. So I said no, and man, did that feel like the right decision.
So now mile training is behind me and I’m just out here running. The only thing I’m really working toward now is hitting my 1,500-mile goal for the year, which I’ll get if I can average ~100 miles each month through December 31—not too hard. I’m also going to try for 135 miles in October because of some virtual Badwater thing my mum and aunt are doing—really need to get clear on the details as October is minutes away. Like a salmon returning to its spawning grounds (or a dog returning to its vomit), I have a sort of default impulse to start marathon training again, even without a race to trot toward. Maybe I’ll sign up for something virtual in February to give some structure to my winter running. I’m also contemplating trying to run the year (2,021 miles) next year, so I’ll need to start building up miles for that. All just various semi-arbitrary scaffolds to put around this thing that is running.
In other news, we got a cat! For the record, we had a cat—the world’s best—but he died and I don’t want to talk about it. Now, we have inherited another cat. Her name is Cali (godawful, but it’s too late to change it) and she is geriatric and pretty mean. This is what our lives are mostly about now:
It’s actually delightful to have a cat around the house again, and Cali isn’t nearly as mean as we thought now that we are her primary food source. So now when I come home sweaty from a run, I’m covered in three kinds of pet hair instead of just two, and that’s about as much of an update as I’ve got these days.
Jo Runs Reno 