The Missing Pieces – October 26, 2017

Still not sure if this will get lost in the web hosting company changeover. Hence – the Missing Pieces.

October 26, 2017:

Yesterday I received this email from the Kathmandu Urban Marathon:

I’m trying to use it as motivation for recovery and rebuilding my training. It’s amazing how quickly I feel like any endurance and built up training miles all evaporates and recedes when not pounding the pavement.  Within a day or two I feel like I’m weeks behind.

There’s a training chestnut that inevitable gets dug up when one contemplates coming back from injury. It is usually deployed in the context of, “I know I’m injured but I’ve got this race or event coming up that I’ve been training for such a long time.  Couldn’t I just do it?” And this chestnut gets plucked from the motivational pile and cracked open, revealing a fortune cookie reply (yeah, yeah. It’s a messy mixed metaphor smorgasbord. I know.)

Are you a lifetime runner or are you running the event of a lifetime?

Basically if you run through the injury it could make things so much worse that you will not be able to run ever again.  In the mind we know what’s the right answer.  But in the heart?  Well…

Is this event so important that it’s worth ending your running lifestyle forever? Is it the one to go out on and possibly never come back from? Ominous and aggressive tough love to be sure.

Is it really so much different from a gate agent at Heathrow telling me I would die if I walked the terminal? For the record – Yes, yes it is different.

There have been events I would have risked as a lifestyle ending run. There also have been runs that were not worth risking much of anything for and yet I ran them injured, or food poisoned, or with a pneumonia.

I’m a stubborn old fool and one has to wonder if I can change this late in life. I’m not sure we ever can change… not permanently. But I do think we can alter for a time. It’s perhaps because of that mindset that I don’t ever want to believe anything is the runner’s lifestyle crusher it could be. Yet I know all things end. Entropy is real. I just hope that this short term hiatus will postpone the final end for a little while longer.

This is a mess. As a reflection of me though it may be a perfect representation of where I’m at… and where I’m going.  Or not going.

I guess I’m still blogging wallowkevinwallow.  Sigh.