The loyal readers who persisted with me through the first four editions of this series must have been left wondering – but what happened next? The sharpest among you surely looked at the timelines involved and calculated an even better question – but what’s happening now?
Wait… what’s that?
Oh… so readers were not wondering?
I see… they were wondering… what’s the point?
Well, that's disappointing, but nothing to be done about it now. Whether you are interested or not, reader, today I’m back with the fifth and, for the foreseeable future, final installment of this running series.
The Fifth Running Dynasty: March 2019 – present
Start reason: Quite frankly, having nothing better to do
End reason: None officially - it remains ongoing. (However, based on personal history, the ending will surely be equal parts tragically avoidable, needlessly sensational... and soon.)
My fourth running dynasty ended in March 2018 with the clear conclusion that running as a form of all-encompassing self-care was both an unbalanced and unsustainable approach. I thought improving balance was the relatively simple half of the challenge. The key for over the past year or so has been finding mental and emotional substitutes for what in the past I had always resolved with a physical approach. I think I’ve made some big strides in this area recently but I’ll avoid those details for now.
The sustainable aspect was a much more complex task. This required a significant shift in my mentality because I needed to think differently about my training plan before I could implement sustainable changes to how I ran on a given day. For most of my life up until the start of this fifth dynasty, my thought process worked something like this:
- Find shoes
- Start running
- Once I no longer felt like it, stop running
Now, this ‘lace up the sneakers and run’ approach isn’t automatically a problem. There was a point in my past when it worked perfectly. It’s just that in 2018 I confirmed that it had become a problem. After a decade or so of going along with my stupid ideas, I guess my body finally gave up. It officially started last March when my feet convinced me to take a month off from any high-impact workouts. This trend continued through the year as my hamstring, hip, or knee rotated the responsibility of slowing me down a few miles into a run. Overall, my results in 2018 were perfectly acceptable from a general fitness perspective but the twenty miles a week that I built up to by the end of the year was a far cry from the plateaus I’d hit in the past.
Now, I’m not going to sit here and dismiss a given workout out of hand solely due to a mileage calculation. However, I am certainly willing to dismiss myself (and my twenty miles per week). To me, it’s a simple matter - if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do my best. As a runner, I can do better than twenty miles a week. Doing my best – it’s a mentality I try to apply to almost everything and given how important running is to me, it’s probably among the last activities where I’m interested in making compromises. However, my reduced 2018 mileage metrics hinted at underlying problems in my approach. When I considered my experiences from the year – dealing with foot pain, pulling up on long runs with a sore hamstring, or simply worrying throughout a workout about the possibility of a sudden injury – I admitted that my thoughtless approach from the past ten years had, finally and perhaps mercifully, run its course.
I started my rebuilding process in late February 2019 with a two-week hiatus from running. During this time, I admitted what I understood about running and tried to pinpoint the areas where I had previously filled gaps in my knowledge with belief, intuition, or self-serving opinion. I realized that although I knew a great deal about the process of running – the act of leaping from one foot to the other in the most efficient, symmetrical, and (I assure you) graceful way – I did not know enough about organizing individual workouts in the context of a broad training plan. A major breakthrough for me was researching the ‘recovery run’, an advanced concept used by elite (or experienced) runners to add extra mileage between hard workouts. I’ve found that applying these recovery runs into my routine has been a major success so far in 2019.
I also used the break to evaluate where my stubborn, willful blindness had convinced me to ignore the obvious distress signals coming from my body. I thought about when my recovery between workouts had left me insufficiently energized for my next run and collected the experiences shared by other runners to help me align my personal goals with the anatomy’s known limitations. I refocused my strength workout to help build up my known problem areas, figured out the right level of food I needed prior to a given workout, and drew up a thoughtful schedule that accounted for my various types of exercise.
It’s admittedly still early days for this fifth (and hopefully, final) running dynasty but so far the returns have been very encouraging. Although I cannot attribute the positive feeling to any single change I’ve described above, the overall picture is coming together. I know the balance is there because I’ve only run thus far in 2019 for no reasons other than fun and exercise. The sustainability is a little tougher to sort out because an injury could sneak up on me at any time but so far I’ve avoided the chronic aches and pains that plagued me for much of the past few years. In fact, I’m finding that in addition to better running performance, I also feel stronger in a number of other indirectly related areas – riding a bike, playing basketball, and simply walking.
This brings me to a final thought that addresses some of what I’ve hinted at so far. Running well as its own goal is ideal and as I referenced I want to do my best in an activity to which I devote a significant amount of time, effort, and thought. However, the more important aspect of exercise is finding a routine that sustains and enriches every aspect of my life. The current fifth dynasty is perhaps the first time where I’ve found such a routine. This is why I’ve suggested above that I hope this fifth dynasty is also my last, one that doesn’t end prematurely thanks to some self-inflicted obstacle but rather finds a natural ending when my desire to run finally runs out.
