Back In The Flock

Submitted by Rickshaw :: Sun Mar 11, 2007 12:13 pm

After a long absence, I'm back with my running club, and it feels good. I originally joined last spring, and at first I went to the weekly workouts pretty regularly. They're a friendly, positive group, and the workouts were always tiring but fun. As summer ended, though, I started to lose my enthusiasm for running in general, and didn't go to the club workouts as often. After mid-September I stopped going entirely, mostly stopped running by October, and sat on my butt a lot.

I was still receiving the weekly emails about how the workouts went, who won the team competitions, and so on, so I felt involved even though I hadn't been to a workout in months. As my running enthusiasm grew again this spring, I did an 8K race and bumped into some of the guys from the club, who encouraged me to come back. Then two weeks ago I got an email from another club member, asking if I'd run a 12K for the team on March 18 so they could field a full five-person under-40 team. Since I'd already been planning to do the race anyway, I could hardly say no.

Yesterday was my first workout with the club in six months. We did a race along a route called the "Short Six", just under six miles, and I wheezed my way through it well enough. It was great to see everyone again, and I wondered why I'd been away so long.

I have a bad habit of taking my running too seriously, and becoming very stressed and obsessed about it, to the point that I get burnt out. I've gone through several cycles of training and racing hard for 6-12 months, then stepping away from running for 3-6 months before returning again. When I start up again, the enjoyment of just plain running and feeling fit and strong is great, even if I'm much slower than before. I need to find a way to stay in that positive zone, and enjoy the act of running without becoming enslaved to workout schedules and PR attempts.