I am participating in 90 Mile November!

Friday, September 2, 2011

Battle Scars & Epiphanies

(As a side note, I weighed myself this morning at G's and my body seems downright ADAMANT about staying in the 262-264lb range. Despite pretty consistent exercise over the last several weeks, it is clear that I am going to have to buckle down on my eating habits quite a bit more strictly than I have been. With the addition of my new Android phone, I think this is a good opportunity for me to start toodling with some apps to review!)

Though I have put about 10km on them on my own, my new shoes (and my feet) were really not ready to amp up to 5k at a time. Or it might have been that I don't have appropriate socks for running (or maybe just pushing myself as hard as I pushed last night). Either way, at the halfway point, I was having some serious pain on the heels. By the time we made it back, I had this loveliness:



BUT I finished, and I had a brilliant epiphany during the last running stretch of the evening. The only way that I can explain it is to paraphrase my internal dialogue:

Me: "This sucks and I really want to stop."
Me: "Your breathing is in check, do you need to stop?"
Me: "No, I don't need to stop for my breathing, but I really want to stop."
Me: "Well, why would you want to stop?"
Me: "My legs hurt."
Me: "On a scale of one to ten, ten being the worst pain you can ever remember and one being just a minor irritation's worth of pain, how badly to they hurt?"
Me: "2."
Me: "Then why do you want to stop? You have worked through much more pain than this. Your breathing is in check, there are only 30 seconds to this run left, and you're almost home. There is no reason to stop."

And so, well, I didn't. And once I had that little chat with myself, the rest of it felt alright, and I finished in fine form. My legs didn't fall off, and I didn't die, though I did nearly become victim of both a sprained ankle and a concussion at the same time, from falling off the sidewalk. Fortunately, even that was avoided!

So now, it's just the heels that hurt. I think my next stop today will be Running Room for a pair of real socks for running!

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