A Tale of Two (Missed) Runs
by Denny Mayo on Feb 7, 2012 7:00 AM PST
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PrintBe on guard. The road widens, and many of the detours are seductive. Be constantly focused and on alert: feral talent is its own set of expectations and can abandon you at any one of the detours of so-called normal American life at any time, so be on guard. -- David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest
As touched on in last week's roundup, I didn't run this past weekend -- and aside from kleph, it seems as though most of the editors here had a rough day or two last week. While the end result of both Saturday and Sunday's missed runs are the same for me, the causes and perceptions of the two couldn't be more different.
Missed runs happen; things come up and get in the way.[1] This is reality, and coming to accept this requires both patience and discipline -- things that are not always easy to come by. But the part that takes a while to come about is having the self-awareness to know why the run was missed and more importantly whether or not that reason holds any water.
So it's time to have a bit of a meta-exercise: I will now be dissecting the weekend and the runs that never were.
The Weekend
Friday night: Wife is not feeling well, so it's an easy-going night. Had dinner at a bar around the corner. Chicken wings and one bourbon for dinner. Go home, watch Lebowski. Drink a glass of water. Go to sleep around midnight. Easy-going night is a easy-going.
Saturday: Wake up at ten (a touch lazy, perhaps). Get a small bite to eat, go to grocery store to get ingredients to make dinner for twelve. Have a quick lunch at home of grilled cheese and soup (it's about 12:30 by this point). Still planning for a mid-afternoon run. Wife is feeling more sick than on Friday, so the bulk of the cooking will be on me: that's fine, there's no need to make our guests ill. Start cooking at 12:45, cook and clean non-stop until about 7 pm when people start to arrive.[2] Have dinner ready at 8, drinks and food and laughs and etc until about 1 in the morning.[3]
Sunday: Wake up on the couch at 8 AM. Drink two large glasses of water, go back to bed and sleep. Wake up at 1:15 PM. Check phone, see message from training partner: he left his house to meet about ten minutes ago. Throw on pants and shirt, walk to meeting spot, apologize for making him wait. Explain hangover situation, apologize again, sulk back home. Spend day in dark.
The Analysis
Two entirely different days, similar result. I'm OK with having missed Saturday's long run -- it was pushed aside due to a mix of things, some of which were beyond my control (mostly my wife being sick, though in her defense I was sick during the week and she got the bug from me). Missing Saturday's run is the kind of thing that I would have been quite upset about early on in my running 'career' but I now accept (begrudgingly) as an understandable occurrence.
Sunday's missed run has been bothering me since it failed to happen. It bothers me because it was supposed to be a long run. It bothers me because I've still got a long, long way to go to get back into shape. It bothers me most of all because it was completely my fault. I spent Saturday night drinking and talking about wanting to run a 50 miler with a good friend -- one that may actually sign up for a 50 miler with me, actually, if I get my shit together -- all the while completely disregarding the planned 12 mile run that would have been my longest run in nine months.
Days like Saturday happen no matter what you do -- life happens, be it disguised as family, friends, work, or catastrophe.
Days like Sunday happen because every now and again I lose sight of where my focus should be, or I get complacent, or I start to get scared of how much work I'm going to have to put in -- and instead of acknowledging that maybe I'm a little bit scared, I give up a little bit. Not because I'm feeling subversive, but because giving up a little bit is just plain easier. As absolutely miserable as that attempt to run 12 miles would have been on Sunday it probably wouldn't have sucked as much as the next few days of disappointment.
The Upshot
The way I see it, my best plan of action is to 1) Get back on the horse (I wrote this piece last night, but odds are I ran three miles this morning), 2) Move on (see Step 1 for details on how to do this), 3) Learn, and 4) Improve. The first two steps are the easier ones -- learning is the harrowing step. Not because the lesson is particularly difficult (don't party the night before a long run, duh), but because it's a lesson that I've learned before and apparently since forgotten. Improvement is the action verb here -- it will be the next iterative step towards my next mistake. I have no doubt that there will be another mistake, and another beyond that -- there always are mistakes, after all -- but this improvement will be a step forward, and that's the important thing.
It takes a long while before awareness sets in and good habits form. Tricky thing is the bad habits -- those detours DFW refers to -- will creep back if we're not careful. We all have our own detours: whether we choose to acknowledge them or not is entirely up to us. If we don't, getting to where we want to be is going to be extremely difficult.
So be on guard.
--
1) I say this without any idea how much time is required for such things as children. I'm just hoping that the lack of exercise and the lack of sleep when I have a child balance each other out and I don't gain a ton of weight. I also know this is not a realistic hope.↩
2) For the interested: Four pounds of Chipotle-style barbacoa, a pico de gallo based with four full tomatoes, shredded chicken breast meat (five breasts worth), about 2 pints of blended salsa, and three cups of rice. I also hand-squeezed two pounds each of lemons and limes for margaritas. We have many leftovers.↩
3) By my best estimation I had three beers too many and three glasses of water too few on Saturday night. I certainly didn't have Sunday's run in mind later on in the evening.↩
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my "productive" week is kind of illusory.
i was still in just conditioning mode so when i ran, how far i ran and how fast i ran were all pretty much run-time decisions. when nothing is at stake, it’s a lot easier to get something done. but the gains are also much less as well.
so up to now i have been purposefully avoiding a regimen in order to get myself ready for the rigors of the one that will have to follow when i commit myself to training. then i’ll be battling the bad-habit monster as well.
SB Nation's The Historical: Because all those games way back when matter.
a week off?
What is everyone’s opinion on starting back up after taking this much time off? I was putting in 30m/week before I started feeling a calf strain coming on so I rested but now I don’t know where to pick my training back up.
by Mafwilliams on Feb 7, 2012 7:56 AM PST via iPhone app reply actions
i've had luck in the past
and picked up right where i left off since the off week worked like a taper. studies estimate that an athlete loses 2 to 3 percent of fitness per each week off. so from that perspective, this doesn’t sound like you’ll be battling “detraining.”
the bigger concern is the injury. if you pick up right where you left off, whatever you were doing that caused it will still be there. try and figure out what factor contributed most and try to alleviate it (things like new shoes, different running surface, fewer intense workouts).
the one thing you don’t want to do is pile on more miles or days to reach some mileage goal. that won’t do much to help you catch up in your training and is almost certain to aggravate your injury.
SB Nation's The Historical: Because all those games way back when matter.
Agreed
I’ll only add that after a bit of a layoff, I like to use the first run to stretch the legs out before hitting the quality workouts again.
My running plan has breaks built into. They are quite beneficially as you are ramping up your miles. For example, every 4th weekend is 3-4 days off in a row. Rest is an important part of any training plan.
by dancing.with.rocks on Feb 7, 2012 9:05 AM PST up reply actions
Thanks
for the info, I think I have a handle on what caused the calf strain. I really like the idea of taking 3 or 4 days off every month also.
I say this without any idea how much time is required for such things as children.
Take your best guess and triple it.
It’s amazing, though: I’m much more disciplined now with a 2-year-old than I was 3-4 years ago when it comes to getting in my runs. Time becomes more precious, so you begin to rely hard on routine. My daughter’s up by 7 on weekends, so I know if I’m going for 10, I need to be out the door by 5 so I can be ready to entertain. The scarcity of time creates its value.
I'll agree with that.
Even having a kid that’s less than a year old makes you plan everything tighter and stick to the schedule. But I’ve noticed that it’s easier for me to hit the treadmill at 10:30 at night every night than it is to hit the trail at 6 in the morning Saturday for a longer run.
Everyone fails. The successful learn from their failures. I just wish we'd quit giving ourselves so many learning opportunities.
by WhiteSpeedReceiver on Feb 7, 2012 11:32 AM PST up reply actions
Hangover running.
I used to have a standing Friday night out. It could get fun dangerous as it was at this tiny place where a friend ran a craft cocktail night. Too easy access to great drinks. I would always make my runs in the morning. It wasn’t pretty. It probably helped greatly that I was running with a group so I had external pressure to enforce some small level of accountability.
Without even planning to, I started to moderate my drinking, turning down free drinks and staying up on my water intake. I’d started skip a night here and there. Now, I would rarely go out on Friday’s before my long run. Much of that has to do with my friend taking over as bar manager at great place downtown. It is jammed all evening so it isn’t any fun to sit and enjoy a good drink and chat.
I guess this is an example of how habits start to steamroll. It certainly wasn’t a conscience decision. So perhaps an approach is to do the runs when you are hungover and that will self-regulate your behavior the night before over time. Running through your hangover is a better medicine than guilt.
by dancing.with.rocks on Feb 7, 2012 9:28 AM PST reply actions
Yeah, back when I was 'training' I did better
Now that I’m starting back up I kind of have lost my barometer for these sorts of things. Now that I’ve totally missed a run I’ll likely be on the straight-and-narrow for a while, which is the kick that I needed in that direction — the training kicked up because I finally printed my plan out.
It’s frustrating, as I know the plans that I should be making to best enable good running — I’m still kind of in ‘well, I’ve done this before and I know I can do it’ mode, without realizing how much work it actually was last time around.
'There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you.' - Wayne Woodrow Hayes
Glad to know there are others
I’ve certainly missed a run or two in my time due to a rough morning (but bad mornings only follow good nights, right?). It’s good to know there are others other there, although it probably won’t stop me from beating myself up when I do miss a run. And truly, that’s probably something I need to get better at — accepting that 1) not every run will be a great run and 2) not every run will be … ran.
I find it’s a lot easier to have this happen in the winter, personally. With no summer heat to beat, in the back of my mind I know I can sleep in and do an afternoon run if a Friday/Saturday night becomes a very late night.
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