Harvest Time

"Striving to better, oft we mar what's well." - King Lear


At this point in the season, there's not much more you can do to increase your fitness. If you didn't do the work over the last ten weeks, it's too late to do anything about it. At this point, there's only trying to stay healthy, stay sharp, and make sure you are getting enough rest to keep the batteries charged.

It sounds simple, but it's hard to put into practice. The art of leaving well enough alone is difficult to practice if there is any doubt that things are, indeed, well. Any lingering doubts or fears become magnified during this "quiet" time in the training calendar. As a result, there's always a powerful temptation to keep ploughing the field, instead of harvesting what has been growing steadily for months.

Well, don't do it. Now is not the time for innovations or killer workouts. Now is the time for consolidation and sharpeners. As the stakes get higher, keep the emotional thermostat lower. Trust the training you have done.

Any budding novelists out there?

And now for something completely different. Did you know that today, November 1st, marks the start of National Novel Wrirting Month (NaNoWriMo)?

It's true! NaNoWriMo is a creative writing project in which each participant attempts to write a fifty-thousand-word novel in a single month. To "win," participants need to write an average of 1,666 and 2/3 words per day (typically rounded up to 1667), which is about three pages, single-spaced, in a 12 pt font. This pace allows little time for revision or editing. This "quantity over quality" philosophy is summarized by the site's slogan: "No Plot? No Problem!"

The description above is taken virtually verbatim from WikiPedia. You can read more at the WikiPedia entry for National Novel Writing Month, or better yet, check out the NaNoWriMo web site.

Why do I mention this? I don't know, maybe because the affinities between the compulsive writer and the compulsive runner strike me close to home.