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Tuesday, November 20, 2012

Time Commitment

When I trained to run my first marathon, half of my run was about how much time I would spend running, and the other times I would spend would be based off of how many miles I ran.  I believe that it's important to balance between the actual miles and the time.  However, ever since the wonderful invention of the imapmyrun app, I've been looking at how many miles I've been running.  Although I've been able to look at the miles I've done, I've more than often looked at how fast I was going and start pushing myself in order to get a good time.

Last night, I decided that I would do it differently.  I'd still be running with my phone, but I put my app off and just ran as fast as I felt like running.  The result?  One of the most fantastic runs I've done in a long time.  It was wonderful, being able to run without worrying about time or writing down how fast I went because... I don't know.  In this case, the lack of knowledge helped me understand that it's not about how fast I ran, but how much time I sacrificed to make this run.  In last night's case, I ran for 2 hours.  They were two glorious hours where I just ran and thought, and occasionally sang.  At first I felt 'bad' that I wasn't recording how many miles I was running, but all in all, that was the whole point of me going out for that run.  It was designed to keep me from working too hard and focus on actually enjoying the run.  The only time I felt 'bad' about the run was at around the 1:40 mark, when I reaaaally needed to go to the bathroom.  Now this was a little bit of a problem.  I told myself 2 hours, and I was dead set on that.  So for 20 minutes, I was calmly making sure nothing bad happened... but man that was awful... Need to remember that before I go out on those 2+ hour runs, I need to make sure to get rid of that extra baggage.  Haha.

Sometimes, we focus too much on exactly what we do and the task at hand and we forget to enjoy the time we took to go through it.  It's good to log in miles and look at how we've progressed, but at the same time, it's also good to just go out and enjoy your run.

Think about going out for a certain set amount of time.  Forget the distance.

Enjoy the time you're out there... running.

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