I’ve come to the realisation that you can learn just as much about your running, from being injured as you can when you are going through a really good period of running. Once again I find myself unable to run for a few weeks, and I am hoping this is a worst case estimate; due to a combination of ‘man-flu’ and a hamstring strain.
This will not be another rant about being injured and the frustration of not being able to run. Not being able to run has shown me how important running is to me and how I miss it when I am not doing it.
So for now November has ended with me sitting with a lemsip and hoping to use a stationary exercise bike, rather than increasing my training load. That’s not to say that November has been a bad month for running. In fact I have really enjoyed racing in mud. Maybe it comes from when I used to play rugby in the Winter or that I don’t mind slipping and sliding on a cold Saturday afternoon. Whatever the explanation I’ve come to enjoy running through the mud, running up and down hills and just generally trying to stay vertical rather than horizontal. There’s also something quite instinctual about running in a pack of people.
Whatever the reason for enjoying running in mud, it seems to make me faster or at the very least feel faster. With a marathon you are constantly aware of not straying beyond a certain pace or speeding up too fast at a certain point. With cross country you don’t need to worry about ‘running out of gas’ or ‘blowing up’; instead you can push as hard as you want without the fear of endless miles of turmoil, knowing that you have ‘hit the wall’. Of course you can still get punished for not judging your run correctly, you will end up slowing down or being caught by other runners. The latter experience is not great for the ego, but quickly helps you learn from your misjudged effort.
That said whether things go right or wrong during a cross-country race, there is the thrill of seeing how far you can push things. You can find team mates who you know of are a similar speed; choosing to see if you can hang-in there with them, race ahead of them or combine to overtake rival club runners. Whatever your race approach there seems to be two other important aspects (well to me anyway): the terrain of the course and how long you can hang onto a certain pace until the race ends.
There’s unique mix of pain and achievement, as you crest a particularly nasty hill to know that you have completed it for that lap ; and you are either heading downwards at speed or you are running flat, with some space to regain your pace and breath. It’s also great being able to judge a course with the right pace, knowing when to push ahead and when to hold back.
Last but not least there is hanging on as you run across the mud. This is probably what I love most about racing; it doesn’t matter whether you are an international athlete or a first time runner. There will come a point during a race where you will exhaust your physical reserves, and it will be down to how you can deal with the discomfort from within your head. You can’t train harder to avoid this pain, that will only enable to hang on for longer, instead it is about embracing that moment and knowing that it will eventually pass.
Realising that things won’t last forever brings me nicely back to what I was talking about at the beginning of the blog. Learning about running even when you are not doing it. I was definitely unhappy about not running Uxbridge, but it has highlighted how my training differs from when I am running and when I am injured. I find that I can be quite negative about the schedule of exercises that will make me better, because they are not related to running, and therefore I do not value them as highly. So for now it is going to be staying in the present moment, learning what I can from being injured and looking forward to running again in December.
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