This month has felt a little anticlimactic. Maybe the colder than usual weather has left me unprepared for a true beginning of summer, or maybe it’s just that summer is my favorite season and I want to be ready to soak up as much of it as a I can. Fortunately this is the first week that I’m officially back at training in full force, so it does feel like a beginning, and what better way to kick off the summer than to be out romping in the early morning light? (Rhetorical question: there is none!) I love leaving my house at 6 AM with the sun already poking its head out too. It’s a wonderful, freeing feeling.
As I pause to write about my physical journey, I am confronted with how difficult it can be to put it into words. I am a reflective person, so I am usually not at a loss for lessons gleaned or metaphors to be translated, but sharing my daily comings and goings is a new challenge. There is the desire to share and to grow in the sharing, but also a real vulnerability in it too. I can be a private person, and I’m not comfortable being too self-promotional, but the compulsion to share this crazy thing I do most days out on my roads, sidewalks, trails is strong. So, here I am.
My runs so far this week have looked like this:
Sunday – 9 miles (easy)
Monday – 4 miles (easy)
Tuesday – 6 miles (easy)
My easy pace is anywhere between 8:30 and 9:00, maybe a little slower if I’m tired. As I run early in the morning, my first mile tends to feel a little creaky, and is sometimes much slower, especially if it’s colder and/or darker. My usual route also starts uphill, so there’s that too. The earlier rising sun does work wonders for me, so it’ll be interesting to see how my summer training compares to my winter effort. As I’ve probably mentioned already, before this January I had a long and early commute. Running before work wasn’t an option, so I was running in the evening. I point this out only because I don’t have any morning running from the last few years to use as comparison, though I was fortunate to have mild summers that made training later in the day bearable.
I’m headed to visit my family over the upcoming holiday weekend, which will mean some miles on the treadmill in my parents’ basement as they don’t live in a very running-friendly area, but it’s worth the trade off to enjoy their company for a few days! I’m lucky that my dad is also a runner, i.e. that there is a treadmill to take advantage of in the first place. It’s also nice that my entire family has embraced the running crazy, which is to say that me showing up with my running shoes no matter where we are is a given. My mom is actually the lone member of my original racing crew. She was the person I dragged to more races than I can count, and all of my pre-race rituals are things we did together. It’s nice to have such fond memories attached to my races, and I’m sure we’ll create many more together.
