I woke up in the middle of the night this past week with a thought: Mid-life crisis occurs exactly at the moment when one stops looking forward, and instead shifts to gazing into the past. It is so easy to look at where you are in your life and mentally catalogue and second-guess all of the decisions you've made that got you to this point. I suggest that that is a practice not worth undertaking. Don't beat yourself up over past choices. Many of them were probably right for you at the time. But even the ones that were not are OK. You were younger then. Now you know more. Live your life as if you are just out of school and looking forward to what you can accomplish. See if you can set a goal for a day, week, month, year ahead, and take steps to reach it. I went back to sleep vowing to try to look forward as much as possible. I'm going to continue to try to live by that line of thinking as much as I can.
Now running:
It seems as if there is little that can destroy a week of running. Cold and wind can be held at bay by wearing the right clothing and picking the right trail that can block the breeze. Rain? No, that's just fun to run in. Heat? Nah. I either go early and avoid the worst of it. Or I pretend I'm training for Badwater. Ice or icy rain? Well, yeah. That'll do it. But so far this fall (knock wood), there has been nothing in the weather that will truly impede the committed runner.
I knocked out 39 miles last week. 29 were on trails. I normally try to get in around 30 mile each week. But my running club, the Lawrence Trail Hawks, were hosting the 10K and 25K Sanders Saunter trail races over the weekend, and I opted to volunteer rather than run. So I did my normal 10-ish mile Saturday run on Friday. I ran 18 miles in the new Hoka Mafates. The shoes took a bit of getting used to on steep downhills and turns. But overall, I found them to be quite adequate for hilly, somewhat rocky terrain. On Friday I wore them on the flat sandy surface of the levee. For that run, I felt good. My feet were incredibly comfortable with the mattress-like feel of the thick soles. I don't know if it was the height, the drop, or the very slight difference in weight of the Hokas vs my Mizuno road shoes (the Hokas are a bit heavier), but I did have a bit of muscle soreness in my quads (where I never experience problems) after the run. I will attribute it to an adjustment issue. All in all, my first week with the oversize soles was fun.
Yesterday, Sunday, the weather was spectacular. It felt like an early morning in Florida. The air was thick with humidity. The temperature was in the 60s, with just a slight wind. My main running buddy of late popped by and we hit the river trails. He and I have been running the much more difficult Clinton North Shore trails lately, and we both wanted a change.
While neither of us was really feeling the run early on, we knew if we just ran through the blahs that things would get better. We got to the farthest point on the trail and popped out the end onto a gravel parking lot that was next to a boat ramp littered with .22 caliber shell casings. We followed the access road to where it intersected with the levee, and then, for a change, took the gravel country roads back into town. I have biked the route many times, but had never run it. It was a nice change and we were in no hurry. We both had gotten our mojo back, and eased into enjoying what we were doing. We ran with wide open fields surrounding us in all directions until we hit the industrial area and had to deal with odd gas fumes and the stench of a dead fox. But we were feeling good. The last mile of our run was the fastest of the day. We cruised on the N. Lawrence streets back to the trail head before calling it a day. It felt so good to be in shorts and short sleeves. We both realized the run might be the last without a jacket for months to come.
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