Returning and running

You can’t fire a cannon from a canoe. @ThisMessyHappy

Hello, it’s been a while. Coding hasn’t held joy for a long time. Still doesn’t.

I set up a table for jigsaw puzzles. The kids were curious and sometimes put together a nose or the sun. Other things punctuated working hours of the day: a little bit of crochet, some reading, and gradually running. At first, it was a nagging worry that my social skills rusted so I volunteered more at my local parkrun. Resuming running would follow sometime after.

When runners would make small talk and ask what my goal was, the reply was (truthfully): “Just trying to get consistent again.” This summer, I completed both my first relay race and my first half marathon race. Both efforts went really, really well. I loved my relay team: we met for evening runs on Thursdays, and they were short a couple runners for a team of four. The half marathon was a race a couple runners at parkrun had done the year before. Luck would have it that the race date landed on my birthday this year and at the finish, my family was waiting for me, cheering and holding a sign. A friend from parkrun was there too and I was so happy to see all of them. Our family made a day of it with pho and boba tea after. It was a beautiful memory. Both races were a beautiful gift, I feel deep gratitude for both.

Race photo by Tiara Bowman

Runners spend a lot of training in Zone 2, a slow pace where you’re exerting but can comfortably talk. Lots of slow miles. During my last runs before the race, talking with other parkrunners and then searching through running videos, a question tickled: were my slow miles actually in Zone 2? The fitness app on the Apple Watch has a setting to turn on heart rate zone alerts, so I enabled it. A couple days after the race felt right to start with a recovery run. If you, dear reader, predicted that I had in fact been running in the dreaded gray zone—not slow enough for aerobic base and not fast enough for building speed—you were correct. Maybe my body and heart were still recovering from the race but oh my gosh. A slight incline on neighborhood flats was tipping me above target heart rate. It stung my pride. A feeling that my run-walk days were behind me, a flawed belief that real runners don’t walk (not at all true). After failing to shuffle slower, finally I yielded and walked to recover my heart rate.

Trust the process.

The heart rate alert stayed on and the next route I planned with a big hill at the start. On a warm afternoon. Again (predictably) it was frustrating but also I was starting to find and feel out where the limit was. A shift occurred.

Of late, my runs had lacked structure: anything that fit my schedule at whatever pace felt “right”. Attention focused on pace, form, push. My watch was unequivocally telling me the correct pace was slower than what I’d been doing. Oops.

Running to build an aerobic base is still in practice and it’s teaching me new things. The alerts helped partly with discipline. It also turned my focus inward to my heart. I understand something of the mind-body connection now, though still developing. Probably because I’m pleading with my heart: please chill the fuck out just relax and hold it right there don’t go one beat higher don’t make the watch yell again oh shit there it went please couldn’t we go just a little faster today. I hear and feel my heart more: her pace climbs steady the further we are into a run, the pressure builds on an incline (and adjusting to relieve her, now with less walking), the ease on a downhill stretch, a brief spike after a cough.

That’s where I am for now. Thank you for reading.