Tale of two workouts.
Living with the bad days
I have bad days. I have low days. I have blue days. I have days where I set myself up to fail and then berate myself for failing. That’s life. Life is dirty and scuffed and used, with patches of the good earth hanging in giant scabs from the cracks.
I bring this up because I’m as guilty as the next social media maven of always projecting the best days and not the bad days. That’s the curse of social media. Some of it is because we want to celebrate the positive. Some of it is that we don’t want to admit to ourselves that our puny existence is as chaotic and scuffed up as the next guy. Being just another cog in the machine. That ruffles our sense of self and hurts our ego.
It’s a bitch. It’s a losing game. When you look at someone’s smiling Instagram feed you are seeing a curated self. Don’t compare your self to that. If you do you will be comparing your average life to their best day ever.
Last week I had one of the, and hopefully the worst, workout of this campaign. 10 weeks out from Boston and coach is getting serious. He gave me a 1:30 step up run. This is a challenging workout. It’s basically warm up and run tempo for over an hour.
I started feeling a bit of a head cold coming on the Friday before the weekend and carried that into my busy week. It was the sore throat and the fever. Because I am a senseless baby boomer with an overly-developed sense of mission I went with my default setting – ignore it and press on.
I had a big week of work and travel coming up and decided that I was too busy to be sick. In all fairness this strategy does work for me occasionally. Occasionally.
I had to travel Tuesday afternoon/ evening and then back Wednesday evening. I knew I wouldn’t have time for the big workout unless I got up early and knocked it out before the work day spun up.
Over the weekend my cold progressed. Not terrible. Just noticeable cough and head stuffiness. I ignored it Monday at the office I had the fever and the sweats, but I worked through it. I knew I was sick but just kept executing like I wasn’t.
As I got my stuff together Tuesday morning my regular shoes were still wet from a hard 10K in the cold rain on Sunday. I threw a newly arrived pair of Hoka trail shoes into the backpack for the workout. They would turn out to be quite stiff and clunky in the cold on the bike trail. It had rained or something and the trail was slick with ice. The conditions weren’t great, but I pushed through.
My legs hadn’t forgotten the effort of the weekend’s 10k either. They were a bit stiff and dead.
I hit the trail down by the Charles and immediately knew it was going to be a hard go. The temperatures had plunged into the teens and I was cold. The gloves I had didn’t really cut it. I was underdressed. I had assumed with the intensity of this workout I wouldn’t need a lot of insulation.
As I eased into the workout my heart rate was high and wouldn’t come down. I felt worse than horrible. The trail was covered in ice. I had no energy and was suffering. I wasn’t even in the hard part of the workout and I was stressed to the max. I thought about turning around and calling it a day, but I was already out so I decided to just try to hang in there for the term of the workout.
I managed to drag myself through the 1:30 but all of it was pure misery. There was no step up in this step up run. There was only survival. I brutalized myself for no reason and probably put myself at risk.
I hate to miss workouts. Consistency is one of the things that makes me successful in my own small way. But, when I reported back to coach he basically said I was an idiot. There’s smart stubborn and stupid stubborn.
I skipped my workout the next day. I was wrecked. Physically and mentally exhausted. I was feeling quite sorry for myself. The only thing I took away from this workout was the thought that ‘one workout does not define me’. That was my mantra when I was trying to finish in the last miles. “This workout does not define me.”
…
This week when I looked at the schedule I had similar workout schedule. You can imagine I was trepidations rolling into the workout. Based on what had gone down 7 days before I was scared. But I changed my approach. I told myself to just go out and focus on turn over and form and let the workout take care of itself.
What a difference a week makes in New England. The day was a gorgeous 45 degrees. I had shorts and a tee shirt. It was glorious. I eased into the workout. It wasn’t perfect, but my HR was solid and my legs held up. I didn’t close it as hard as I would have liked but I ran with purpose, skill and, yes, a little bit of joy.
When I Logged the workout, I was pleasantly surprised to see an average pace that, if I could hold it for 26 miles would get me a 3:15 marathon.
That’s the tale of two workouts. The same workout on two different days. One cold, sick, icy and terrible. The other spring-like and inspiring.
That’s how life is. It isn’t all smiling-perfect-teeth-Instagram. It isn’t 2.5 perfect blond children and a dog. It’s the dark times and the shit on the floor. That’s all part of what makes it worthy.
It’s these cold, dark days of training for Boston when you are alone and afraid, when you are tired and when you are sick, that make you strong. Boston Strong. It’s the sideways snow and the freezing rain. It’s not wanting to do it with every fiber of your being but doing it anyhow.
People look at you from the outside and think you must be lucky, or genetically gifted or love the work. We don’t. And the work doesn’t always love us. It’s the struggle that we love. It’s the striving, the failures and the joy of knowing that at some point the hard work pays off.
That hard work doesn’t pay off in the races. That hard work pays off in mindset and lifestyle. You can float through life eating Doritos on the couch or beating the crap out of yourself at 5:00Am down by the river and you will end up in the same place. In the big picture it doesn’t matter.
You can believe what you want. I believe that it is our striving that makes life worthwhile.