A little Inspiration

I have such an optimistic view today.

Although it’s raining outside, and according to the forecast, it should be raining like this for the entire day.
That’s ok though. Work is slow right now. I have one project to take care of by the end of the day. It shouldn’t take longer than 30 minutes to complete. So, what am I to do?
I’ve gone ahead and printed a 2010 calendar to plan for some races for the upcoming year. This gets me all excited and in the mood to run! I went online searching for all sorts of races, 5K’s to marathons, road races to trails. Anything fun, new, different, same old favorites…you name it.
I quickly realized that one year is not enough time to do everything I want to do. For example if I pick a 5K that I’d like to PR on, I can’t expect to run a Marathon the weekend before. Chuck and I also have our kids every other weekend, so I have to keep in mind that if we want to run a race on the weekend we have kids, we would have to arrange for a babysitter. So you see, it’s not wide open to run whatever we want to run.
This fun search for races around Georgia and maybe even Florida, got me all in the mood to run… I was feeling my mojo.
Last week was a down week for me, running and otherwise. I was just not feeling it. I’m past it now and feeling wonderful.
I decided to go through the blogs that I follow and just randomly read over everyone’s past year of blogs. I came to the realization, that even though we say it to each other as a comfort when a fellow runner is down… but we ALL really do go through the same things.
Each and every runner that blogs goes through the same cycles.

• The “Oh my, I’m going be the best runner ever, I’m going to hit every workout, every pace, run every day, I’m a beast”
• Then the, “Ok, I’ve been running a lot, now what"
• Then the, “I hate running, I havn’t run in X amount of days, weeks, I wish I had the will to go out and run, what’s wrong with me?”
• Then the “OK, I’m through whining about this, let’s get out and run, do my best, be a strong runner, eat right, and hit every planned workout”

We all go through the same cycles. The beautiful thing is, that we always end up back where we started. Fully motivated, recharged, ready to go out and conquer the world.
Not only that. By reading all of my fellow runner’s blogs I remembered one reason I love running so much. It is such an individual experience. We can all be runners, but we all have our own goals. We can be at so many different levels of ability, yet compete in the same event. We don’t have to win the race to meet a goal. We just go out there and do it, do our best, and set our own bar higher and higher as time goes by.
All of this may have been inspired by the amazing speed workout at the track last night.
RC posted the workout on the Macon Tracks site, he called for a 1 mile warm up, 6 / 20 second strides, 2000m – 1600m - 1200m – 800m – 400m all at interval pace followed by a 1 mile cool down. It sounded tough, then I thought about the fact that after the first interval, it would only get easier. Sure enough, we got to the track early since we wanted to get started to get back to Byron. Mom was watching the kids for us so we didn’t want to be out too late.
We warmed up for our first mile, easy. We did our strides. I did NOT want to start that first 2000 meter interval – 5 laps on the track at a goal pace of 7:38. Ugghhh. Regardless, we started it. The first lap I ran a little too fast, so I slowed my roll a bit. Then I settled into the 7:30’s.
2000m – 7:37 Pace, complete.
Then we walked a 400m and geared back up to do a 1600 interval, one mile at a goal 7:38 pace. The pace felt good, I felt strong, and my stride felt very steady.
1600m – 7:35 pace, complete.
During our 1600m the regular group was meeting up for a briefing from RC about the night’s workout. I was already into the workout and I didn’t want to cool back down so I just ran through it. After finishing the 1600 meters (at a 7:35 pace) the meeting was just finishing up, and I looked at RC’s dry erase board where the workout is always written out. He wrote “Killer Intervals”. Ha Ha. The cool part is I knew I had already completed the first two and the last 3 would be a piece of cake!
I ran the 1200m interval at a 7:31 pace.
The 800m at a 7:38 pace, and the 400m at a 7:27 pace.
Overall I stayed under my planned pace of 7:38 so I considered the workout a success. Now I’m ready to tackle the Reindeer Run on Saturday. Hopefully I’ll have a good report from that race. PR or not, it will be fun!