I Am Getting Closer To Doing The Right Thing.

Deep inside, I want to run extremely fast, leave a rooster tail burn on the trail behind me, blaze up a hill like my turbo is in overdrive, but realistically, I have learned to accept that I am not that person.......I am the other guy.

I am the guy that works 50-60 hours a week, has family responsibilities, is surely past my running prime (as far as speed goes), can't seem to stabilize my weight and struggles to train in parallel to my desires.

My mind desperately wants to be a racer, yet I don't like racing, I never have. Of course I loved every minute of the "after race high" and did accomplish some decent times my first two years of running (when I was 46-47), but I always had the pre-race jitters and uneasiness rather than a competitive drive.

Lucky for me I found trail running which is pretty competitive near the front but in a different way than road racing. The camaraderie between the fast, the slow and the middle packers is very strong and all trail runners feel welcome.

What this has taught me is to enjoy my runs more .....isn't that why I am out there running in the first place? Well this is my second year running mostly trails and again I have no nagging injuries, that should tell me something as when I was "racing", I constantly had some type of injury that interfered with me obtaining my best performance.

So, for total enjoyment, I have to work in some fun runs. This means no monitoring pace and distance, no heart rate and no expectations. I wonder if that is really possible as I have trained myself to factor all these things to keep my racing on track.

Last night I went to Bradbury for some hill work. I parked the Garmen and the heart rate monitor, I started up the nano to record my time as I wanted to run for about an hour. I told myself I would not think about pace and I would refrain from looking at the Nano while running.

I left the parking lot feeling quite free. I just started running at a comfortable easy pace and immediately began enjoying the run. Though I didn't run totally naked (no...not that, I mean stripped of recording devises) I did not once pull out the nano and see where I was at.

My goal was to run 4-5 miles on the mountain hills without walking and I came pretty close as I only walked....well climbed, in the spots were the rock cropping were quite steep.

It's funny, the part I enjoyed most was the downhill sections. I usually find myself pushing hard at this point to try and make up for the slowness of the uphill. Because it didn't matter, I ran slower on the downs.

In the end, I ran 5.5 miles, a bit over an hour, over the mountain three times and almost accomplished my goal. I did record my run and have stats to decipher, but did not stress about it while running. I think If I keep trying, I will actually end up allowing myself to run with no monitoring devises at all......someday.

5.5 miles @ 1:07:06 (12:12 pace)

splits:

12:34
12:23
11:33
12:43
10:55
9:59 (9:12 kick)