Hard to Get Started

For some unknown reason, I've had back pain all day. I'm not sure what caused it. I just woke up with a stiff, sore back. My plan was to run five miles at lunch and five or six miles after work. I ended up not running at lunch for two reasons. One was that my back pain made it hard to stand and the thought of running wasn't a pleasant one. The other reason was that I was the only one in the office for a while, so I was pretty much tied to my desk until 12:30 or so, which was mostly an convenient excuse not to run. After work, the back pain was still there, but I forced myself out for a run anyway. One of the reasons that I was able to get out the door was that I was thinking about a guy who ran twice a day everyday for 20 years. When I heard about him, I thought that was stupid because of some of the injuries he ran through. However, I figured if he can do it, I can run with a little back pain. I ended up running nine miles, and I was basically painfree throughout the run (well, at least after I warmed up I was painfree). Tonight I still have some back pain, but it's better than it was. While I could wake up tomorrow a.m. in incredible pain, for now I'll say that running today was a good idea.

While running this evening, I was thinking about what to enter in this blog. One of the things that came to mind was my pace. I'm not very good at running slow when my body needs to take it easy. I feel lazy when my pace is slower than 8:00 minutes per mile. Today I ran at approximately an 8:15/mile pace. I was thinking that I finally forced myself to run at a pace that will allow me to log miles and recover for the next day; however, the truth is that I finally allowed my body to run at an easy pace when it was telling me that's the right thing to do. I thought I needed to force myself to slow down. The truth is that I need to not force myself to speed up unless the schedule calls for it. Let's hope I can continue to improve in this area.