Running is Weird

I’ve been writing and re-writing a blog post for the past couple of weeks about running since Vineman. The gist of said post was: Man, running has sucked so much since Vineman. 

I took more time away from running than anything else — more than a week before I ran even a step, and 10 days before anything that could be considered a “real run” — and yet compared to swimming and biking, running has been such a slog through the rest of the season. I had a decent 2-mile time trial in the second week of Santa Cruz training (and tied my PR from earlier in the year of 16:23), but that time trial led to tougher pace prescriptions at track workouts, and most of the time, I just have not been hitting the numbers. I feel like a kid who needs 90% to get an A and keeps getting 89% on every quiz. And long runs — which have topped out at just over 8 miles — have been slow and awkward. Thank goodness I’ve been doing most of them with company, because the conversation has been their saving grace. I’ve switched to newer shoes, I’ve started MYRTL-ing again, but nothing’s quite clicked yet. 

But maybe I don’t know anything at all about running, because this week, we had a surprise time trial re-test and I somehow ran a huge PR. 

I truly have no idea how that happened. I did go out way too fast: My first mile was a 7:53 — a number I’ve seen, uh, twice before in my life — and my second a wobbly 8:07. But even that 8:07 would have been the fastest mile I’ve ever run at a time trial. And I didn’t feel completely destroyed the next day, so I might have had a little more in me if I’d been smarter about pacing at the start. But a 23-second PR? After this crappy summer of running? 

I suppose this teaches me a couple of lessons: 

1) trust your training; there’s some kind of dark magic in it. 

2) running makes absolutely no sense at all.