The power of crap

I am something of a perfectionist. Or rather, a recovering perfectionist. This manifests itself in various ways, but we are gathered here today to to talk about running.

I used to get really down on myself when I had a bad run. A "bad run" usually translated as not going far enough or long enough or fast enough, having to stop and/or walk, feeling tired or hungry, being passed by the elderly, attracting unwanted comments or looks, having to run into the wind for too long--basically, every run I ever went on. The certainty of having what I deemed a "good run" felt far beyond my control.

I'd return from such a run feeling defeated and might even let it deter me from trying again for a few days. I had this concept of a perfect runner--the Platonic ideal of a runner, if you will--who was out there seven days a week, doing endless hill repeats solely on willpower and a bowl of Cheerios eaten 10 hours ago. I'm not even sure these runners actually exist. But in my mind, everyone else in the world was one of them and because I wasn't able to complete that day's run the way I'd wanted to, I'd failed in some way.

Lately, I've begun to embrace crappy runs. I have a pet theory--yes, I've graduated from running neophyte to one of those pretentious runners who cultivates philosophies--that you need the bad runs to really appreciate the good ones.

Take yesterday: I was feeling pretty good at work. My energy level was steady. I'd eaten enough and I was well hydrated. The weather was decent--warm, dry, mild wind. I practically ran home from work so I could change into my running gear and run some more.

I started my usual 10K route in reverse, along the False Creek Seawall. About 10 minutes in, I noticed I was breathing harder than I normally do for the amount of effort I was exerting. I didn't think my fitness could have declined that much over the past few weeks (I haven't been running as regularly as I should be, with a half-marathon coming up next month), and so I decided just to take it down a notch: steady instead of tempo pace.

Then, at 25 minutes, I took a one-minute walk break. Then, a few minutes later, another. Finally, a few minutes away from Granville Island, I sat down on a bench and hit stop on my Garmin. I watched a few runners I'd been pacing go by. I listened to the shouts of the dragon boat teams practising in the creek. I felt the sweat running down the back of my neck.

Newly determined, told myself I was going to continue. I went a few hundred metres and just stopped dead. I'd run out of gas. Maybe I'd misjudged and hadn't eaten enough. Maybe I was more tired than I thought . Maybe my heart just wasn't in it. Maybe I had indeed lost some of my endurance and needed to redouble my training efforts. All I knew was, I wasn't going to finish this run.

Luckily, I'd brought my bus pass for just such an event. As I mentioned in my last post, I didn't used to do this. And I felt a little guilty for bringing it this time, because it made it almost too easy to walk up and catch the #50 South False Creek a block away. But it was cooling off and I couldn't fathom walking the 5K home, into the wind, uphill. Plus, Ugly Betty was on in 40 minutes.

So I wrote yesterday's run off as a 5K that was better than nothing. It was actually sort of funny to me that I couldn't do 5K after doing five times that much on Sunday--it almost doesn't seem logical, and I guess that's the nature of the beast. You can train diligently for months but run a terrible race, and it sucks, but the latter doesn't negate the former. A bad run today means the possibility of a better run tomorrow.

And when I hear myself say things like that, I feel like a less-toothy Tony Robbins.