Showing Up

-
Road signs, Toronto, 2014

12 km 

58:23 / 4:52 pace 

21C nighttime cycle lane run


I just remembered the quote that is attributed to Woody Allen: "Eighty percent of success is showing up." This afternoon I was raring to go and was all set to go out to run 16 km along the beach. Just before I was about to go, the rain fell hard enough to put a stop to that idea. I don't mind running in the rain, but a downpour like today's would just have been unpleasant and I decided to wait until nighttime. 

 I hit the street at just after 9 PM and I could easily have just turned round and gone back to my apartment. I had zero motivation and as I set off I had the worst thought a runner can entertain: what is the point of this?

 I don't know what it is that brings these doldrums on. I had rested in the afternoon and I should have been in good mental shape for a long run but all desire to run any distance at all evaporated, for no obvious reason. OK, I have been exercising every day now for 124 days straight, so that might have everything to do with it. But it came at me out of the blue, in the elevator on the way down to the street. A real mood swing. 

 I wasn't sure what I was going to try to do, so I just set off and made it up as I went along. I distracted myself long enough to run the second kilometer in 5.01 after my typically slow first kilometer of 5.39 and then I decided to just run out six kilometers on the cycle lane (not sure why I didn't want to run on the beach this time) and I thought I would be happy with 5.13 pace overall after 12 km. 

 At about the 2.5 km mark I was feeling great and could see the average pace tumbling. This gave me the mental boost I needed and I finished at a very satisfying average pace of 4.52. 

 I could make a legitimate claim to have beaten my target pace by 21 seconds per kilometer but that would be wrong. The run was just made up on the hoof and the best claim I can honestly make for this one is that I showed up. That's enough. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Pent Up Athlete

-
Image
The beach, São Vicente - this is the 3.5 to 8.5 km stretch of my run, turning back at the foot of the two apartment blocks in the middle of the picture. At night I run along the silver line where the sea laps onto the shore 12 km  59:21 / 4:57 pace  17C nighttime beach run, 16 kph wind   I got home tonight at 10:00 PM after taking two hours to drive 87 km from the University of São Paulo. Every time I drive to or from São Paulo I am forced to confront the failure of Brazil up close. It is a broken country but no one seems to mind much. No one except me. It drives me crazy and when I got home I was in two minds. I was tired and fed up and I have an early start in the morning, but I also really did not want to skip a day's training. I knew that if I did, the anxiety would probably keep me awake all night anyway, so I decided to go out and see what happened.  I promise not to drag this on any longer, but the traffic light fell for me. You know what that ...
Read more

Junk Smiles

-
Image
Rippled sand on Santos beach 12 km 1:05:31 / 5.27 pace   Night beach run, 22C. Tired.  Felt fine tonight, but understandably tired after recent exertions and two days of revising a 200-page thesis. My task was to revise the English, as it had been written for a doctorate by a non-native speaker of the language. Given that I understood nothing of the subject, I simply had to ignore my lack of comprehension and focus on the language itself. The overall impact was very tiring and very strange, reading page after page of stuff that made no sense to me but making sure it was in good English. I felt like a robot and I suppose if I had the time and inclination that experience would be an interesting basis for a comment on whether or not Artificial Intelligence will ever achieve consciousness. Luckily for you I don't and won't.  This was slow but there was a sweet moment in the middle when I felt I could just run all night, and that running was in fac...
Read more

Reckoning

-
Image
Detail 1-35327, by Roman Opalka "The problem is that we are, and are about not to be" Roman Opalka 16 km  1:23:54 / 5.15 pace 7.20 pm start. 22C. Windy.  I used to say - to myself and anyone who would listen - that when I have nothing to say or write I just write or talk about what someone else wrote or said. It's something about this need I referred to the other day about sharing personal obsessions, or perhaps it's just about fearing silence, or the idea of silence.  Today, however, I am not falling back on this simple technique, although so far it seems like I am in fact doing quite a good job of filling space with nothing. No, I thought about Roman Opalka - quoted above, with an example of his attempt to paint numbers from 0 to infinity - because I have just done the calculations for the end of the month and I found myself jotting down a lot of numbers on Post-It notes. Like this: September & October: 631.70 km. 54.97 h...
Read more