Six Months, But Who's Counting?

This afternoon I'll head over to Cold Springs Park around 6:00 p.m. and at some point after that, I'll go for a run. I might have company -- there will be lots of other folks there -- or I might just run on my own, since most of the NSRP guys run a lot faster than I do now. But anyway, I'll go for a run, then I'll go home and write down the modest mileage in my training log.

The only reason I mention it is that it is the last day of June, and that means that we are approximately halfway through 2010, and so far there are no "0"s in my training log. Out of boredom, I guess, or a desire to have some sort of modest goal for myself in my advancing old age, I decided to make it a point to run every day in January. As I feared, this project took on a life of its own and I now I find myself with a six month + six day running streak that shows no sign of relaxing its grip.

I hasten to add that I don't consider this any kind of significant achievement. It's really just an exercise in following through on what was essentially an arbitrary decision when I made it, and seems more arbitrary as the months go by. That's not to say that I haven't learned some things along the way. For example, I've learned that running every day is fairly easy -- easier, in fact, than figuring out when to take days off during serious training. I've also learned that the circumstances most likely to lead me to break this streak have much less to do with bad weather or injuries than you might think. Instead, I am convinced that when I miss a day it will because of some relatively silly social event or travel obligation, combined with lax planning on my part. In other words, that missed run will be the result of inattention, not hardship or exhaustion.

Sometimes I'll mention to a family member that my last day off was on Christmas Day -- it doesn't sound cool, it just sounds odd. I think it would produce about the same effect if I said that I had recited the Gettysburg address every day for the last 187 days. "Yeah? Well, that's.... interesting..."

But here's the thing: the streak has conferred to each run a kind of significance above and beyond the boring sameness of most of my running these days. I haven't skimped on the long runs, the races, etc. -- those are still memorable efforts. But now, even the 3-mile recovery runs take on an added meaning, just because each of those runs could easily have been a day off, but wasn't. It occurs to me that it might be healthier to have those days off, without the "empty calories" of these token jogs. Maybe my hamstring would feel better, my foot would stop hurting, and I'd feel fresher and faster. Maybe, maybe, maybe...

Well, I'll have to sort that out one of these days, but not today. Today I'm going for a run.