Running is a mental sport. And yes I do mean that in more ways than one. In my never ending quest to maintain a positive attitude about my upcoming first marathon, I have convinced myself a silver lining can be found in injury. After taking 7 days off following that 25k run and 5k limp back to the car, I felt there was enough improvement in my ITB and hip to start very short runs. Feeling much like a beginner again, I have completed a 3k, a 5k and a 7k in the last four days. For each of these runs I stopped regularly and stretched. Obviously these distances are not going to prepare me well for the marathon. So what is the silver lining? Well, I have struggled throughout training to run at a slower pace. This makes me sound like I am some kind of super fast runner but I can assure you that I am not. I am, and probably will always remain, the average runner like my blog title suggests. I do though have a certain pace I like to run, no faster, no slower. But right now I am paranoid that I will injure myself more, so suddenly running a slow pace seems like a necessity and as a result is easier. It is also not frustrating me to stop and stretch throughout the run. Normally that would drive me crazy. So a little patience is working its way into my psyche. As that patience becomes a part of my runs, I am finding it possible to go back to my original goal; simply finish a marathon. No time expectations, no worrying about having to walk parts of it. It has become too easy to fall into a slightly bizarre marathon mentality where a 25k run is a huge disappointment because it wasn’t far enough. Seriously…25k, that is in itself an accomplishment and yet I spent a week upset by that run. <\/p>\n
As I enter the last 6 weeks of training, still not having run farther than 26k, perhaps my new mantra should simply be “Patience, patience, patience.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Running is a mental sport. And yes I do mean that in more ways than one. In my never ending quest to maintain a positive attitude about my upcoming first marathon, I have convinced myself a silver lining can be found in injury. After taking 7 days off following that 25k run and 5k limp […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-295","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-running"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3amQ2-4L","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=295"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":296,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/295\/revisions\/296"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=295"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=295"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/raz-family.ca\/RunKristi\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=295"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}