run this amazing day

Welcome to the off-season!  Please leave your bicycle outside. I've made a lot of training decisions in the past few days.  After hearing from a few people that they were doing thirty runs of thirty minutes (or longer) in thirty days, I've decided to join them AND make my own rules.  So here they are.  I will run thirty different times this month.  A run/walk counts if I do even a few minutes of running as long as I am moving for thirty minutes.  I will take days off whenever I need them (cough yesterday cough).  I will double up a few times to make up for the days off (cough today cough).  If a run is longer than thirty minutes, I will count the time towards the grand total of thirty minutes multiplied by thirty times at the end of the month (i.e. leave myself a giant loophole for all the days I skip).  I will not wear a watch, a heart rate monitor or any other electronics while doing these runs.  I will run with friends at their pac...

As usual, zero recollection of goals I set a month ago. October Goals Big changes.  DON'T BE SCARED.   Far, far bigger than I thought. Do not overeat at the first stop on the cupcake tour.  PACING!!   It was weeks before I could look at another cupcake.  Okay, days.  DAYS. At least one PR (spoiler, attempting a new distance).   A heap of life stress turned into the sniffles turned into my first-ever DNS.  No PRs for me this month. Keep doing the "let's mash our workouts together and sort of capture the general spirit of the training session" rides with your girlfriends.  So much more important than nailing intervals.   Some of this, but all of my girlfriends are solidly in the off-season (as am I) so we captured the general spirit of several bottles of wine instead of rides. Do not die in trapeze class (hope Sonja isn't reading this one).   Yes! The new vegetable thing.  Or at least don't go two days without eating some...

Coming into the Marine Corps Marathon my biggest challenge, enemy and hurdle appeared to be the miles ahead and the voices in my head. I knew I can run faster and farther than I did at Philadelphia last fall. I knew I could run faster and farther than I did at National this spring. In both of those races I hit a wall where I simply could not push any more and needed time to walk and slow down before running again. My goal was to push that wall all the way back to Iwo Jima, to shut down the voices in my head, which always give up long before my body. I thought those voices would be my biggest enemy.  But before I could get to that wall I needed to face something I had not expected. The day before the race, the day before my 40th birthday, I went to packet pickup and got my number and shirt, when the Marine who handed me my shirt said “Semper Fi.” I said thank you and turned away, just in time for the image of my father, a mean bastard, SOB who I spent the first half of my life...

I really feel as if Cedar Point was my season-ending race, and everything that came after was just a bunch of half-assed training shenanigans. I wrestled hard with my bicycle motivation in particular throughout October, and last Saturday was thrilled to unpack it from the car and back into the basement, where it has lain, still in pieces and covered with mud, for the past week.   I decided a few days before B2B that I was going to take a solid week off after the race.  I've read a pile of articles/blog posts/chapters in books recently about rest following a long season, and it appealed to me quite strongly.  Last year I felt the same drop in motivation , although it didn't show up until after I ran a half in late November and was staring down a long winter of trainer workouts and time in the pool.  From my training log, I can see that I took off four days in a row, and that was enough.  Poking back through my log even further, I don't think I've taken more...