The Path

Running should be simple, maybe that's why I like it, one foot in front of the other, repeat. Easy enough. It never is though. Is it only the theory that's easy part? The execution is anything but. Maybe, I'm not doing it right. Maybe, that's just the way it is. Maybe, it's suppose to be like this, easy in concept, difficult in practice.

When I think about the big picture, it's hard not to see similarities between running and life. Both have successes, failures, lessons, ups, and downs. Both should be easy, yet no matter how hard you train or plan, there is always going to be something unexpected that makes it complicated, not to mention the unknown. It's here that I'd say at least with running, there's a set start and finish, but that's not necessary always true either. The path in running holds just as much uncertainty at times as life. Where am I going with this? I don't know, but feelings wise, I think I'm at some kind of crossroad. The past couple of weeks it seems like lots of soul searching, almost trying to find a new identity.

This weekend featured two runs, a race and a long run. I didn't feel like I had good training runs this week. I can't explain the reason, they just felt blah. I wasn't confident going into the race this weekend. This happened to be the first race that I had ran before, so I knew the course. From an improvement standpoint, I knocked three and a half minutes off my time from last year. Running it though, I had high hopes of getting my record time, but didn't even come. That was very disappointing.

The next day, the thought of running twenty miles had me scared. The first sixteen, I felt surprisingly good. Though not nearly as fast as a 5K race pace, it's hard to understand why things felt good. Trust me, I wasn't questioning it too much and decided to go with it. With four to go, my legs got tired and I would have loved to pop some ibuprofen, so the last few weren't pretty, but they got done. This coming marathon has me nervous. Want to talk about the unknown, this is it.

Different blog entry for me this time. Head feels like it's got tons of data to crunch on a slow processor. Think I need a run to clear my head ;)