highs and lows

Yesterday's run was unexceptional but still tiring: just over 7 miles with the dog. I walked up a few of the hills and avoided the big ones altogether. The dog was mailing it in too and reserved his energy for the end. He suddenly jumped/flinched--maybe he was stung but I couldn't find any bumps or swellings--and then he backed up against the first tree we came to and defecated. Most of it stuck to the tree. Was it Art? A canine poultice of some sort? This is the first time he's done something like this and I'm mystified.

This morning, it was pouring rain. Nobody's cup of tea. I took to the TM for my longest TM run ever: 1:40:00 (ten-ish miles, I guess). I put on a CD that I didn't remember playing before...it's part of a 7 disk set of club music, and some of them I've played quite often during workouts but not this one. Turns out that I didn't like any of the tracks until the 9th and 10th; I guess I'd forgotten that.

The first 30 minutes of the run were dull mentally and physically and then the endorphins started to flow and I felt better. The songs on the CD gradually got faster, and so I gradually pushed up the speed. Time passed and eventually the CD ran out after about one hour and twenty minutes. It had been mostly underwhelming. I switched to the last CD in the set which has the quickest tempos. I adjusted the treadmill speed, still keeping to an easy effort, still breathing easy, but moving.

And then, after a couple of tracks, something seemed to unlock. I felt like going faster. Near the end of the workout, I pushed the speed the highest I've ever pushed it up yet, in the middle of the 3rd of 4 "zones"--I have no idea how fast or slow anything is on this TM because I still haven't replaced the batteries required for the display--but this was fast enough for me to open up my stride and get on the balls of my feet. It felt pretty fast except for the lack of effort. It was delicious and disconcerting.

I pushed the speed up a bit higher and waited to trip and get flung off the back of the TM. A minute later I was still on the belt; the song switched to one with a higher tempo. After a few minutes, I'd fall apart, surely, but 3 minutes into the song, I was still feeling effortlessly fast. It was bizarre. I still wasn't breathing fast. This felt faster than a 800m repeat, but easier even though it had gone on for longer. How long would this last? There were springs under my thighs keeping me aloft.

I don't know because I decided to stop soon after. I valued the experience too much to smash it closed, and I started to worry that, if I let myself go until I fell apart, then I would be able to recapture only that falling apart, and not the fluidity and grace before. I'm not a graceful person, but I felt graceful and buoyant during that 3-4 minute interval; I've been striving for feelings of efficiency for awhile, but never grace because I've never felt graceful before while running.

This has also given me a new perspective on speed work, the shorter faster interval one pushes through during training. I haven't been doing any speed workouts at all because I figure that the hills are more than enough, but maybe I can incorporate some speed work during some of my treadmill runs. Oh, incorporate is the wrong word: rather, invite. Only when I'm feeling good, and without force.

This type of consideration reminds me of my time as a classical musician/student: my goals were always more mechanistic than they perhaps should have been. Could I play this passage perfectly at 120 bpm? Ok, how about a bit faster? And, always always always, how do I get it feeling so smooth and automatic that I could just let it go? I performed a bunch of virtuosic pieces, practised them until I could unleash them reliably close to perfection (and a few renditions were perfect), close to the recordings that the audience members had at home, but I never realized until later that I could have made things a lot more exciting by pushing closer to uncertainty, wrestling the performance to a precarious point. Sometimes this happened accidentally and it was so intense and vivid. But this isn't what I or most of the audience members wanted anyway, nor is this what I want from running right now. Sometimes, yes, I want to push out of the safe zone into the unknown, but not now. I want things to be easy.

The run ended up being about 1 hr 45.