Aimless

Today’s run really just threw my whole being into question. I know that sounds a bit heavy for a lunchtime jaunt down Limebank Rd, but lately I’ve felt like I haven’t been able to keep up with things in life, or rather, taken on too many challenges. I love to challenge myself and in running, I’m no different. Today I realized that running is the one thing that I don’t want to ruin by making it another challenge. I want running to be my escape and, while it serves that purpose now, I don’t want my thoughts all day to involve running. I don’t want to feel like I have to finish 5 miles by the end of the night for things to be good. I want running to be the one place in my life where nothing truly matters.

I’m sort of second guessing my thoughts about this new change in my way of thinking. I have to have goals – even on just one run. But I don’t want there to always be a date, a time, a record to strive for. I keep thinking back to my days of aiming for military times. I said “one day, I want to run this time” and I worked towards that in any way I could. I made up fun little interval training exercises and I craved running. It wasn’t something I felt I had to do. I was thinking, “I can’t wait to get back on that treadmill and run tonight!”… I think it’s about time that I chill out a bit and mix it up. I’m definitely making sure that x-training happens this week and I am for sure sticking with my run-xtrain-run-xtrain-rest goal for the week. I still plan to run a 5K or 10K here and there, and if one day I feel like running the half, I will. I just feel that for now, training is leading to injuries, which is leading me to not run, which is leading me to misery!

I haven’t really come up with a goal for training yet. How do you have a goal for goal-less training? It’s so foreign to me to go into something without a plan. I guess my goal right now is to make every treadmill or outdoor session its own. I just want to run a few times a week for not more than an hour and just run how I feel like running that day. If I’m bounding with energy, it’ll be a sprint session. If I’m craving something chill, maybe a long slow one. Exhausted? Recovery run. All I plan to do is record my times for every run and my distance. Hopefully over time I see a trend of getting faster/having more endurance.

And maybe I’ll check out those Marines times.