Just do it. Wait, wrong shoe company.

On crankyfitness.com there is a post about good diet and exer­cise habits that stress­es that per­fec­tion­ism is the key ene­my. There’s a very amus­ing dia­logue between Crab­by and her con­science about get­ting to the gym. It’s real­ly true that the hard­est part of run­ning is (often) just get­ting out the door. That’s one of the rea­sons (per­haps the most impor­tant rea­son) for all the spe­cial­ized gear: the run­ning shoes, the Dri-Fit or Cool­Max cloth­ing, the GPS and heartrate mon­i­tor. If I start by putting on my des­ig­nat­ed equip­ment, it cre­ates a momen­tum until I’m ready to go and would start to feel fun­ny just sit­ting around in all these fan­cy fab­rics and electrodes.

Some­thing occurred to me as I was pulling on the Kin­varas this morn­ing, and it is telling that it occurred to me instead of already being in my head. The thought was, oh yeah, I enjoy this.

That’s what it final­ly took to cut through all the neg­a­tive thought and pro­cras­ti­na­tion pol­lut­ing my head. Some of this thought was jus­ti­fied cau­tion: I want to make sure that I don’t injure myself. That’s why I only ran twice last week for a total of only six miles. Espe­cial­ly after Wednes­day’s painful run I have to allow my cau­tion a voice. But while rest heals, rest does­n’t strength­en. Strength­en­ing and tech­nique will be the things that help me pre­vent injury in the long term.

On my run I expe­ri­enced some of the knee dis­com­fort that halt­ed my run on Wednes­day, but this time it was kept in check by keep­ing my knees bent, back straight, cadence high and most­ly stay­ing on the fronts of my feet. I’ve ben told not to inten­tion­al­ly run up on the balls of my feet, but rolling over my heels is not doing well for me so I’ve been spend­ing a lot more time with my heel light­ly touch­ing the ground after the ball of my foot. That keeps a lot of the stress off my knees and lets me use my foot as a shock absorber.

That’s some­thing that is a lot hard­er to do with shoes that have a raised heel. Although it was sug­gest­ed to me that I not jump direct­ly into run­ning with the Kin­varas full time it feels a lot bet­ter to run in them. My body will be the final arbiter of what shoes I run in. It seems as though it is time that I retire the Omnis. When con­sid­er­ing what made this run bet­ter than my last run, it’s got to be the shoes. 

Whoops, that’s the wrong shoe com­pa­ny, too.

The ther­mome­ter says 75° here in San Fran­cis­co and there isn’t a sin­gle cloud vis­i­ble. The Embar­cadero was quite crowd­ed between the crowds here because it’s Pride week­end and the peo­ple going to the Giants-Red Sox game. At the far­thest point I got away from the crowds by run­ning out on Piers One and Five where the only peo­ple I saw were fish­ing. I’d meant to go to the end of Pier Five at some point and had nev­er got­ten to it until today. It’s a wood­en pier and the sur­face is quite irreg­u­lar, which made it fun to run on. After stop­ping to take a cou­ple pic­tures, I turned around and came back home.

At sev­er­al points I came close to stop­ping but remind­ed myself that fatigue is a con­stant com­pan­ion and pushed on. Almost every time with­in sec­onds of decid­ing not to stop I’d real­ize that my breath­ing was under con­trol and that my legs did­n’t real­ly hurt. There is some men­tal process that tells me I have to stop. It’s hard to ignore but I can for a peri­od of time. At about six and a quar­ter miles I passed the water foun­tain by Cres­cent Cove and could not resist the hydra­tion. After drink­ing a lit­tle and splash­ing some on my head I con­tin­ued on walk­ing and walked the remain­ing mile home.

Of course, I’m glad I went and I had a good time. It’s strange then that it is so hard to remem­ber how much fun I have run­ning when I’m in bed in the morn­ing talk­ing myself out of going for a run.