Sorry, no time to stop for pictures

It’s been over a week since I went for a plain ol’ run. There were walks, a bare­foot excur­sion and some rest days, but I haven’t been run­ning. I have been rest­ing some over­ly tight calves but that does­n’t make me miss the run­ning any less.

It’s nice hav­ing GPS to keep track of my route. I used to plan my runs out in advance and not vary from the path lest I lose track of my mileage. With the GPS I can wan­der a bit and not have to build routes based on a finite num­ber of sub-routes with known distances.

When I walked out the door I thought I was going to start by going down­hill, but some­thing caught my atten­tion. It turned out to be only a bicy­cle chained to a tree near my motor­cy­cle, but from down the block it looked as though some­one had left some­thing on top of the Moto Guzzi. I went up the hill to inves­ti­gate, and then just kept going. I went to the top of Potrero Hill and then back down, to the water­front and took pret­ty much my reg­u­lar route around AT&T Park, though even that saw a few vari­ances from the nor­mal route.

I made a con­scious deci­sion not to focus on my stride, but just run. Para­dox­i­cal­ly, that gave me the best oppor­tu­ni­ty to exper­i­ment with my stride, because it meant that my adjust­ments were very minor, and based on what I was already doing. «Hey, that feels more like it. Let me keep on doing that,» was pret­ty much the theme of the day. I’m car­ry­ing for­ward every­thing I’ve been read­ing about run­ning, stride length, foot­fall, form, all that, but mak­ing very small adjust­ments. At least, only mak­ing small adjust­ments today.

Notable progress for this run: I ran to the top of Potrero with­out tak­ing a walk break. I ran four miles with­out tak­ing a walk break. My times are pret­ty long, but that’s not new. I did spend a lit­tle bit of wast­ed ener­gy mourn­ing the days when a ten minute mile was a bad day—today I’m push­ing myself just to break a thir­teen minute mile. But the only thing I can do about that is keep going.

That’s what I redis­cov­ered today. Some­thing I used to keep with me when­ev­er I ran: keep going. It does­n’t mat­ter how slow, just keep going for­ward and main­tain run­ning form. If I’m tired, slow down. The soon­er I rec­og­nize it’s time to slow down, the less I have to slow down. I have a nat­ur­al abil­i­ty to recov­er with rest. I dis­cov­ered it when I was 22 and bicy­cling the moun­tains of North Car­oli­na; that I would get to the top of a hill exhaust­ed, feel­ing like I could­n’t go any far­ther, but once crest­ing the hill and and get­ting back on flat land, it would be just a few sec­onds before I was ready to start push­ing again. Maybe every­one is like that; I don’t know. What I know is that I start­ed expe­ri­enc­ing that again today. It felt like I was push­ing too hard, so I slowed down. When I did that, in just a few sec­onds I no longer felt tired.

The prob­lem with stop­ping is that it’s too easy to stay stopped. Slow­ing down is enough. As the DSE Run­ners say: «Start slow­ly and taper off!»