I have been running, off and on and off again, since 2006. This has been the best season I've had so far, and I'm writing about why so I'll remember. These are the things I've learned:
1. The first two miles are a drag. I almost always feel a little grumpy and out of breath until mile 3. For a long time I liked the feeling I got after I ran, but I had to drag myself out there.
2. Then it gets fun. This is the first season I've gone on runs longer than 3 miles, and I can't really convey how surprised I was that I loved miles 3 and 4 and 5. During, not just after.
3. Sweat is good. I love coming home soaking wet, having worked hard enough to sweat through my workout clothes. This is a novel feeling -- both the sweating and the liking it.
4. Stronger is better. It's always hazardous to extrapolate from an n of 1, but this year I added strength training to my schedule and this year I had no joint pain at all -- until six weeks after I bailed on strength training. I went back to Pilates on Sunday night (and my abs still feel like a megalonyx thought they might be a suitable spot for hibernation) and I am still planning to see if I can hit that weights class again even though my schedule has changed.
5. Slow on the trail is better than bitter on the couch. I have always felt like I was too pitiful to call myself a real runner. One of the many cool things about my summer running group was seeing that my pals in the second-slowest group were undeterred by their lack of speed -- they signed up for races that looked like fun, at each one they ran the best race they could, and then they collected the T-shirt at the end. All of this, apparently, without gnashing their teeth over being slow. Go figure.
6. It really does get easier. I wrote in March about how badly my first run of the season went. I didn't record any details because I found them embarrassing, but I wish now that I had them for reference. Two things in particular that feel like milestones to me: first, when I am doing intervals on the treadmill, I can jog for the recovery interval instead of walking. Second, when I went for my first outdoor post-sprained ankle run it felt painfully slow. I refused to feel gloomy about that, since slow and steady wins the race to be free of the Ace bandage. When I got home I plugged my route into Map My Run with low expectations. I was happily surprised to see that my painfully slow pace was <11 minutes per mile.
7. Success breeds higher expectations. Now I am thinking about doing a half-marathon in the spring with one of my friends here in town. Can my aging hypermobile joints take that much pounding? Can I make time for the training given that I have five kids and a job? No idea, but I think it's worth a try. I'll keep you posted.
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