A return to the routine. That is all I am looking for from my running in the next few weeks. Simple stuff. No fuss. No pressure. Running with pals. What could be better?
While I have recovered well from my ultra three weeks ago and feel no ill effects from the race, I am very conscious that I have given my body a bit of a battering since the start of the year, and as I am not getting any younger, I need to just give myself a bit of a break. As an older runner, I know that I cannot continually push my body and go from event to event to event without taking some time out for some recuperation. But this does not mean not running, it just means recalibrating what I am doing.
“the feeling of being a bit lost”
The weeks after a big event can definitely feel like a bit of an anti-climax. The major challenge is over and the target you have been working towards for weeks or months is now gone, so what next? This can lead to post-race blues, and the feeling of being a bit lost, particularly if you have been religiously following a training plan with clear goals, expectation and a huge amount of discipline and routine. With nothing like that to keep you honest and no race to keep you motivated, it can be easy to get a bit lost, lack focus and just drift.
There have been moments after major events where I have gone out and thought, “what is the point of this?”, especially on a cold, dark or wet night but there is an easy answer to that, and it is that running provides me with so many physical and mental benefits. Yes, there are the rewards in the form of medals or t-shirts or whatever, and these are hugely important to me, but it is the sense that I am doing something that, twenty years down the line, will still be giving me something back.
Talking of medals, however, this week a memory popped up on Facebook of my medal collection from five years ago, shortly after I had completed my second marathon. This was the picture.
Now I was very proud, and rightly so, of my medal collection in 2019, after all I had run two marathons plus a handful of other races and distance challenges. That was what prompted me to get a medal hanger so I could display them easily and have something to look back on, rather than having them hidden in a drawer. They are displayed in my home office. But since then, things have escalated slightly, as this is what my medal collection looks like now.
I do not want to seem smug by posting this, as in, “hey look at me and all the medals I have got.” That is not what I mean by this at all. What this represents is balanced effort and motivation, and that is why I am showing it. It shows what you can achieve if you bring the right balance between racing and running. I would not have all of these if all I did was go from race to race (though I recognise it might look like this is what I have done!).
After every race, where I may have gone through that down cycle where I think “what is the point?”, I have always found the point again. And that has been through taking it easy for a bit, enjoying social running, getting back to coaching with my local jogscotland group and remembering those benefits which I outlined earlier. It is certainly not about beasting yourself to set a PB every time you go out and run, it is about finding balance in your running to maintain an equilibrium and balance.
“push myself on a short run”
For me, that means getting back to running maybe four times a week. A couple of times with jogscotland, and then a couple of runs over the course of the weekend. This could be with friends or it could be on my own, depending on how things work out. Last weekend, I ran once with friends, and then on the other day on my own and on that day, I tried to push myself on a 10k run, really for the first time in months. In fact, probably the last time I really pushed on a run was one of the races I did in the summer.
I have mentioned before that I would like to work a bit on injecting a bit of pace into my running again, having focused so much in recent months on endurance, so this was a way of testing this out. It was very hard, on quite windy day on a route that took me around Aberdeen beach, and there is no way I could have run at this pace if I was with someone else and attempting to have any kind of conversation, but I kind of guess that was the point. Someone far cleverer than me once said that to run far, run with friends and to run fast, run on your own. That is certainly how it works out for me.
But again it is about balance, so while that run gave me a great deal of satisfaction, there is much more pleasure in running with friends, enjoying (at last) a bit of decent Scottish spring weather and the scenery around the rivers and parks close to where I live, and just finding the joy in that. And if life is about nothing else, then at least it should be about that, enjoying ourselves. We are not here for a long time, we should at least devote some of our energy into making sure that we have a good time along the way.
And if that is normal. If that is what regular running looks and feels like. If that is the way to spend quality time, then why not prioritise that? Racing is great – I love a race day and everything that goes with it – but it is not everything. So this is why giving myself a bit of a break from the big stuff, focusing on a bit of pace for a change, but most importantly just enjoying myself with my pals, and some normality, that is what the next few weeks of running looks like to me. And that is more than enough.
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