I've been told that I will eventually need a knee replacement, but as I am young yet, the doctors don't want to do it until it is absolutely unavoidable. In the meantime, I sometimes overwork my knee and subsequently have to take a couple days of near complete rest just to be able to do the day-to-day stuff. When I took up running, my doctor warned me that I would need a strict 1 day on, 1 day off regimen so as not to overwork my knee. Yes well, I thought, I now run 3-4 miles at a time several times a week with no problems, things will probably be just fine if I move the days around a bit. Nope.
So, after my long run on Sunday my knee was a little achy. I gave it a day and it was still bothering me, so I decided to take a few days so as not to make it worse and be sidelined for weeks. After it had been 3 days I was itching to run again. Odd, I'd been struggling with motivation for weeks. And now all of a sudden I wanted to run again. You don't know what you've got 'til its gone? Absence makes the heart grow fonder?
That got me to thinking. What if we treated motivation as an injury? Now, I don't mean the normal hesitancy, or trouble getting our butts out of bed in the morning. I mean REALLY struggling outside the normal. What if we recognized this as a mental injury? After all, a huge part of endurance running is the mental challenge. So, just like with any physical injury, what if we decided to take a few rest days and run strong, instead of forcing our way through it and having mediocre and unsatisfying runs? Just like it is critical to take rest to heal physical injuries, maybe we need to just take a few days to rest, and then come back mentally strong.
What do you think?
I hope I do not offend you when I say that sounds like a delicately wrapped excuse to skip out on training to me. I have a billion excuses not to run- some of them are REALLY GOOD too. But aside from illness or injury (be it my own or my loved ones') I feel that we should push through. Not every run is going to be a good run. Accept the bad ones as an integral part of training. If you don't plan to sit down and take a break during your race, then don't welcome that idea during training.
ReplyDeleteI'm not offended at all! Quite the contrary - I agree with you completely! I suppose I didn't explain myself well. I was talking more about a stretch of motivation failure that stretches on for weeks and is a daily struggle just to keep going. In that case, if taking a day or two off could help me to come back strong, it would seem worth it to take a short break. What do you think?
ReplyDeleteyou have rest days for that purpose- resting is not just for your body. we need a mental break from conquering distance too. wait and see- the REAL long runs (that come closer to double digits and truly approach the "holy crap can i even DO that?" level) might take any and all motivation away during the run! then what?
ReplyDeletemost training programs allow you the room to shift the schedule a bit and if taking 2 consecutive days off works for your schedule and your body, i don't think there's any harm to it.
i suggest finding what motivates you instead. if you haven't registered for your race yet, do it asap. it mentally "locks" you in. picture the finish. picture how you'll feel afternoon, that evening, the next day... plan and budget for some sort of celebration. during a run find something to look forward to when it's over and focus on that. (don't make it about food all the time) during my longest training run, the thought of my couch nearly brought tears of joy. seriously.