Far From Flabby February

[Mid Life Crisis Marathon Man]

Sometimes, short slow runs are the hardest.

In the middle of a hot, humid Sydney summer, neither mad dogs nor Englishmen will you see running the streets during the day. Only the early morning and night time hours are suitable for donning the running kit, so what is a night shift working middle aged bloke with only the hottest, mid afternoon hours available for running to do?

Well, yes, of course, he jumps on Thunder Road and completes his scheduled run anyway, madness coursing through his veins or not*.

Actually, this self-imposed torture got me thinking, at least as much as my befogged brain allows me to think at the moment. After a string of night shifts, the body feels and moves like bruised blancmange. And the brain? The brain functions not at all. And yet, after a kilometre or two, a sort of revelation cracked open the shutters of my noggin and allowed some revelatory light in.

I've always believed that there really aren't any "junk miles". They're all important, and if they seem of little relevance, it's only because you have run so many of them that your resultant fitness allows them to seem so. But stop running them and suddenly you will have no such easy efforts. And it goes doubly so for me at times because I often schedule "easy" (junk)  miles when the work/life schedule is too chaotic to permit a long or tough run. Such as in the middle of, and particularly at the end of, a string of night shifts. And it occurred to me that these are some of the hardest runs to do, because (a) you least feel like running them at all, and (b) because (and this was the revelatory bit) they are the generally short easy "junk mile" runs it actually feels justified to skip them. This is a dangerous thing to do, as a skipped run leads me all too frequently to the slippery slope of motivationlessness, and of course the quicksand death of the training schedule.

And so this little piece of insight saw me reaching for the speed control and winding it up to race pace and making the bugger count, which was odd, because a "short easy" was all the schedule demanded, and all that was really required or even sensible considering the conditions, both in terms of weather and my mental and physical state. But perhaps there is a bit of the mad dog in me after all.

Ah well, what the hell. A good run was entered into the spreadsheet and smug mode engaged.

God, this running game is good.





P.S. Oh, and just to prove that Aussies are just as mad as anyone else ... perhaps more so, here's today's TdJ:



And should you need some help understanding what this song is about:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Down_Under_%28song%29


*Madness is, of course part and parcel of the MLCMM make-up.