Day: trail running

On last soccer practice yesterday evening, though it was at different park, thankfully near enough to my favourite trail-running park for it to make sense for me to drive over and run. Seems ridiculous to drive to go for a run ... but I just love these trails. They're easy on my joins, and the hills are crazy, and it's such a challenge. Plus, I can see the improvements in my cardio and strength after a summer of running them fairly regularly (not quite once-a-week). I still haven't found a way to figure out distances on these trails, but when I started running them, half an hour of hard running did me in, and I'm up to a full hour, now.

There is a running club (actually, more than one) that meets and runs these trails on Thursday evenings. They might be a university-based club, because their numbers have swelled these last two weeks, but there are several older men among their number, so I haven't quite figured them out. Most look university-aged. They seem to start with a free-ranging warm-up (I can never guess which direction they'll be running for that, and you kind of want to choose the same direction, because they're a huge pack; going the wrong way is like swimming against the tide). And then they run a loop, down and up, and around the field. They seem to run several intervals of this loop, so I'm guessing it's between 1-2 kilometres. Might just be 1 km with a cool-down built into it. So yesterday, I ran around and around, taking different paths and trying to avoid getting in anyone's way. On my last time around, I decided to run their loop, and it happened that just as turned onto that path, one of the faster groups blew by me. So I chased them. I wanted to see if I could come close to going how fast they were going. Downhill, it was pretty easy to keep up, but they were definitely faster than my on the straightaway at the bottom. But I saw a group of slower runners ahead of them make way, and then realized I was running much faster than this group, too (and they were also with the running club). They politely made way for me, too, and then I had to pound up the hill ahead of them, trying to maintain pace. At this point, I'd been running hard for an hour, and I was pretty much at transcendence, so I pushed it up the hill, and continued on after the faster group, who were now a couple hundred metres ahead of me. But I wasn't quite brave enough to follow their exact path out of the woods and around the field, sprinting after them.

I'm not part of the team, after all, just an interloper. So I finished my run by heading for the parking lot on a different path. Afterward, I wished I'd run after them just to test myself out. Why not?

And I had a couple of different thoughts. One: why are there no older women running with that running club? There are quite a few older men (ie. older than me), lots of young men, and a fair-sized group of young women. But not one woman older than university-aged. Weird.
Two: I'd really like to run with a team. I sense that it would push me in ways that I can't push myself. Psychologically, it would be hard, because when I'm on my own, I'm always the fastest (and the slowest; you know what I mean). It might feel like I'm pushing myself hard, but without that extra jolt of fear/encouragement that competition provides, I can't know how much harder I could actually push. I wonder how one joins a team?

More running thoughts and some confusion: how hard is too hard? For example, should I have run two days in a row, both days pushing very hard? I ran a personal best 12km time on Wednesday evening, and then went out the very next evening and ran for approximately the same distance, pushing as hard as I could. (I know I'm running at my preferred level of exertion when I'm breathing too deeply to talk; if I can talk, I'm not running very hard). Is that too much? I've read that runners should take breaks after races--two weeks after a 10km race. ???? But I try to run much like I'm in a race, when I run, most runs. So I don't know. I may be wearing myself out rather than building my strength, who knows. I'm not an expert. Another reason it would be nice to run with a team, and a coach.

Can I just repeat, ad nauseum, how much I love to run? I love digging down into the layers of myself, into the layers of the experience, which seems to get harder and then somehow, weirdly, easier, almost like my body can tolerate more as my mind drifts further and further above the experience. I felt yesterday like I was coming into a deeper understanding of the meaning of transcendence.