Back to life

After a very long break from a really hot summer, I could not take being away from running any more.  I  promised myself that when it first started to cool down, that I would get back to the trails.

That time has arrived, and I have slowly eked back into running.  It has been mostly very good to be back but there have been difficult elements.

The good part is that is feels good just to be out out there moving again and getting some fresh air.  I have never spent these kinds of hours sitting, reading and writing as I have the past copule of months.  My body feels awful from it.  It's nice that its not so hot that I can actually  go out (for short miles) with a couple of water bottles instead of a 2 liter guzzlesack strapped to my back.

Another aspect I especially missed about running is that it really reconnected me with my body and let me experience life outside of my head.  I have had to 'live in my head' so-to-speak with the hours of study that I have put in.   Combine that with a lack of activity, and it is a recipe for disconnect for me.  So - the experience of being out there is nice.

My body seems not to have forgotten the art of how to recover, and I have only been really sore maybe once that I can remember.  I've been impressed with how quickly I feel rebuilt after what seems like a brutal workout. (realistically -  a total wuss workout.)

However......

I have taken little 'breaks' before and these breaks were just short 'my-body-needs-a-break' breaks rather than the extended break that I just took.  This is the first extended break I have taken, and it has been substantial enough for me to lose essentially all of my base.

It feels pretty crummy to struggle through 5k right now.  There were recent times where I probably wouldn't even run less than 5-6 miles for most workouts.  I will say that in the cool of the morning I have done far better than in the heat of the afternoons.

I can see definite progress, and I certainly feel better.  It is very hard to be patient and get even a small base back.  At this point my goal is to get comfortable with 6 miles again.  Once I am there and we are done with all afternoon heat for the season, I am re-joining my training group.  Bandera 25k is the goal this time.

It's good to be back.  I will be glad when it's better to be back and when it's all running and not running and having to take the occasional breather.  I know that I can get my base back but I have to find a way to be patient about that and not tell myself what pace, what comfort level what I *should* be doing because I always find myself comparing that to when I was in my best shape, which is stupid.  I'm not sure why I expect to immediately be where it took me months of work to be before, but some naive inner part of me thinks that I can 'pick up where I left off.'

This is one of those ridiculous double-think things I try to sell myself.  Like "healthy pastries":  would you like your dose of cyanide full strength, or merely diluted?

Some jerk stole my Garmin out of my truck a few months back.  I admit that I loved my Garmin, and I found it especially useful when I was doing quality workouts and distance training.   I also logged every workout from my Garmin to TrainingPeaks and it essentially became a self-updating workout blog with stats and things I wanted to see about my workouts.  That part I miss.  The part that I do not miss is that I would often engage in the aforementioned pace/distance games with my mental self way-too-often on workouts that were not about pace or distance or speed.  Somehow, it turned me into my own e-bully.  This was nice for interval workouts and ones that I really wanted to push, but it was a habit that I did not shake when it was not needed, and it often reared its head at bad times during certain runs when I would get really disappointed with how slow I felt I was going in relation to how fast that I wanted to go.  Again, that can be nice when you need or want to push, but when you are just doing survival miles to build your base it can put you in a bad mental place.  It seemed that when I was starting new training cycles this was pretty par for the course, too.

With that said I am actually enjoying getting back to running with my plain old Timex Ironman watch.  No GPS, no screaming at myself every 5 seconds, and not knowing exactly how many miles I have or haven't gone but a rough approximation.  I mentally know the miles on most of the greenbelt from my house enough to where I have near GPS idea of it anyhow.  For now, I will stick to being 80's runner with my ultra modern digital watch.  It shows me time and I can keep up laps, and I'm not judging myself by the second on pace.