Commencement

Ok. Let's begin at the end. Prologue: 21 posts along my journey to the Dublin Marathon. Epilogue: Yet another episode in the litany of weather-related impedance. A steady diet of 30 mph winds broke me down and relegated me to an official PR of 3:15. I was ready, but the cosmos was not. Or more more to the point, I wasn't ready for everything.

Words are funny sometimes. Sometimes we say words for concepts and ideas that are generally understood, but that most of us have never considered the meaning of the word intrinsically. We drive on a parkway. We park on a driveway. Wait, what? And, at the end of high school, we have a commencement. Sure, nothing funny going... WAIT. You commence with something at the BEGINNING! Commencement? What the hell? Hrmmm. Oh I get it, it's not to celebrate achievement, it's to commemorate the beginning of the next major chapter in life.

Well I guess commencement day for me over the past few years has been the day when I get home from my last marathon and sign up for the next. Everything is fresh and new and I'm ready to take on a new cycle. A new way of looking at things, a fresh approach. When I got home from Dublin, my legs felt pretty good. I took a few weeks off, but I jumped right back into running. I ran a fast 10k and took that as a sign that I hadn't lost fitness. I signed up for a spring marathon and started training. I'll spare you the details of the "fresh" approach that I took but the basic idea was that I knew what I needed and to hell with a 'program.' Things never felt quite right. I had a sinking suspicion throughout that something was wrong and, in Mid-February, those suspicions came to life.

Everything broke down. I was exhausted. Nothing was 'injured' per se, but I couldn't run. I just couldn't. My legs hurt. A LOT. My body hurt. A TON. But, infinitely more importantly, I hurt. My 'being' hurt. I wasn't enjoying forcing myself to run. This was a first. In 5 years of marathon training, not ONCE did I feel like not running. In times of injury, I knew that I shouldn't run. But that's totally different from not wanting to run. And I'm not talking "It's 5:30 in the morning and I had 3/4 of a bottle of wine last night" not wanting to run. I'm talking about "I'm done with this shit. I hate how I feel and I just wanna go do nothing" not wanting to run. I tried taking a week off. I tried taking two weeks off. Two weeks turned to three. Three weeks turned to 4 and I had already reached as far as I had ever gone without running since I started.

A little less than two MONTHS after stopping running, the 2009 Boston Marathon was contested. Aww hell. The excitement. The anticipation. The drama! Two Americans with legitimate shots at winning. I took a half day off work to stay home and watch. By the time the little montage introduction to the race had finished (and I finished wiping away a little tear of confused emotion), I had almost made up my mind that I would be running a marathon in the Fall. The brain started coming around. I was excited. The Americans came in 3rd, mens' and womens'. To get in the mood, I had gone for a run the Saturday previous. All of my aerobic fitness seemed to be gone. I still had my pace, but I got winded after only a few miles. I knew I'd have to start slow. But I knew I had to start. A few runs later and I pulled out the books and materials.

I started a training cycle with a plan a week ago. Today, however, is commencement day. Today is when my body felt the groove, and it felt good. Not the groove of the run, but of routine. It felt really good. I was excited to get up at 6 this morning because I knew at the end of a short run, I was allowed to do a few hill sprints! I was excited that one whole week of mileage was under my belt and I hadn't broken down. I was excited to get home and read more of the Brad Hudson training book from which I'm deriving my training plan for this cycle. It felt good that, even though it's a Friday in spring, that there's nothing important on the social schedule for the weekend. That all I need to worry about is keeping healthy for my long run Sunday and for my key workouts next week. It felt so good that I had to share. Maybe this time will be the one. Hope is a pretty awesome thing.

Welcome to Commencement Day. Let's try this again.