Friday, October 5, 2012

Dry Spell

The Toronto Waterfront Marathon is 9 days away. Other than my post on getting a juicer, I've not written anything since early summer and this post is just a brief update with an explanation.

First, Toronto will be my forth marathon and the first one I will run barefoot. My intention had been to write about my training for this marathon using a program provided in a great marathon book, Advanced Marathon, which, in my opinion, is the next level of marathon training for me. That clearly didn't happen. The short explanation is that I lost my way, took the wrong path, if you will. I was having problems staying motivated and couldn't seem to successfully run any notable distance. I think the problem can be traced back to my little calf injury that happened a week after Smuttynose - one year ago. From that point on, things just compounded slowly, so slowly that I just couldn't see it, but things were definitely building. About halfway through my training for Toronto, which wasn't going as planned, I realized what was happening, I'd lost the joy of running. This acknowledgement allowed me to refocus on my love for running and let go of all the secondary noise. I reassessed my goals for Toronto, I let go of time and pace goals and set the obtainable goal of running a marathon I could feel good about. Ironically, the first step was giving myself permission to not to run the marathon if I felt I wasn't ready. I held onto the goal of running this marathon barefoot as running barefoot was the one thing that remained a positive throughout.

So, after Toronto, there are several topics I plan on writing about, some of which will be more detail of the above, and several will be about things I learned along the way, such as breathing, nutrition, mentality, and conditioning to name a few. And of course, my first blog post after Toronto will be about Toronto. Stay tuned :)

No comments:

Post a Comment