Crush

My relationship with running is a lot like my crushes in high school.  You know...geeky, awkward me in the corner yearning to be like the calm, cool, collected, popular girl in the corner.  Running is my ultimate crush.  I love her.  The way she talks, the way others seem to dance through with ease, the way she seems to be perfect in every way.  And sometimes, like today, when I'm feeling out of control and hopelessly uncoordinated...she smiles at me. 

I had a grrr-arg kind of day.  One of those days that isn't really lousy for any particular reason.  Nothing went wrong, but nothing went particularly right either.  I was irritable, bitchy and generally angry at the world.  There has been a lot of uncertainty and transition in the last few months.  I got through the months of  immediate crises with a fair amount of grace, but now that the pressure has let off a bit...I find myself falling apart a bit. 

I had a tempo/interval run scheduled for today.  I'm using the terms somewhat interchangeably because I haven't done enough regularly variable training to really understand the differences between my paces under various time/distance/exertion rates (last year my goals were just to A-finish the race and B-not die.). 

Today, as previously mentioned, kind of generically sucked.  So I decided to throw away the neatly planned, color coded, treadmill speed driven training run.  I decided that it's early enough in the training plan that just logging the miles for the day would be sufficient.  I also decided that since I was tossing out the plan, that I could toss the treadmill too.  Today was to be a run just for me. 

I picked a relatively flat route (95 ft gain, 95 ft loss) because I didn't want to deal with the big hill on my other route.  I just wanted to run...and by jove I did!  I like the podrunner pod casts because they are beat heavy and don't have many lyrics.  Just noise to match my stride.  Try to keep the beat.  Miss the beat and just get back in sync.  I kicked the pants out of it!  I ran and I ran until my soul didn't hurt anymore.  1.3 miles over the planned training distance, but, whatever, it felt good. 

Today, I loved running, and she loved me back.