on the road



American distance running needs better facial hair

 Been traveling a lot this week but able to get in a decent week of training, mainly by running as early in the morning as I can.  Friday morning, I ran for two hours, and ran twelve miles yesterday and about ten this morning.  Tammi's in the thick of marathon training and has also been putting in high mileage.  There's a great podcast with '83 Boston Marathon winner Greg Meyer here.  He talks about the buildup training to his victory and argues that we all need to race more, even when we're tired from training.  One thing he says is, if you love to run, you probably want to race, and I guess that's true.  It's taken me a long time to get over the need to PR every time I race. 

When you first start running, the PRs come easy and in succession because you're getting in better and better shape, but eventually, you reach a sort of a plateau -- a plateau that's physical but that also has to do with the constraints of daily life and how much you're willing to give to the sport.  You can gain a lot of fitness by upping your mileage, but eventually, you top out the number of miles you can reasonably run in a given week; you can add intervals for intensity, too, and get in better shape that way.  But though the PRs still come, you have to work harder for them; and if you're to enjoy racing, you have to get over the need to PR and race, even when you're not tapered, even when you're not trained.  This has been hard for me to do but something I've been improving at over the last two years or so -- just racing as much as I can and enjoying it.

I have to admit to another thing here: I haven't exactly kept to my vegetarian pledge - it was too hard.  I was feeling crappy on my runs, especially on long runs which are marathon training bread and butter, and very tired overall, so I had some beef and began feeling better.  My training's going great now.  It's wrong not to eat mindfully, but how wrong is it?  That's the question I'm asking myself.  It's very selfish to put running ahead of the welfare of sentient creatures.  It's also impossible to act in the world without being complicit in some way with something you can't morally sign on to, and we have to choose our battles. 

Watched some of Weeds last night -- great show.  It's amazing how durable the genre of suburban anomie is, and how many directions it can go in.  Also, why did TV get so good in the 00s?