T-Minus 1 Week 'til FR4W

Patience, they say, is a virtue. Crap. There goes my shot at being virtuous.

I am not patient; never have been. I get frustrated easily, especially when one step forward is followed by two steps backward. Hell, two steps forward and one step back is almost as frustrating to me. My frustration threshold is pathetically low.

So here I am, one week 'til the Cookie Run. In the last two months, I've experienced the mother of all physical, psychological and emotional rollercoasters. At some point in your life you've probably taken a ride like that, so right now you're thinking, "Been there, done that, threw up my corndog." Yup. You've got it.

I've sort of developed a love/hate relationship with running: when everything is working properly, I feel energized and confident and capable. When something goes wrong, it screws not only with the physical aspect of training, but even more so with the psychological and emotional aspects. And when you're already feeling compromised in those areas, the additional frustration really takes its toll. Some days the frustration is a nagging little thing that acts like a pebble in your shoe (which, interestingly, is probably the only nagging little thing I haven't managed to experience...yet), but it throws off the whole run and starts the dominoes tumbling. When your thought process is what's getting in your way, it can be a ferocious little monster that eats away at your concentration and, as a result, your energy. When the problem is something physical that pops up—not being able to get your breathing to fall into a comfortable pace, or inexplicably feeling like you've got nothing left in the tank despite being properly (but not overly) nourished, or really nasty crap like shin splints—the result can be a real downward spiral. The one day less than two weeks ago when I experienced shin splints (out of almost six months of training), I started out feeling great, like I was going to have a good training run. The weather was, as Goldilocks would phrase it, "just right." When I started running, I struggled to get my breathing into a decent cadence, no matter how much I tried to relax. It was as though I was getting plenty of air but no oxygen. Just a very weird feeling all around. My lower legs were aching, but I kept telling myself that was just my leg muscles trying to rid themselves of lactic acid build-up. Just one problem: it wasn't. Like a fool, I decided to run through it. It was all I could do to cover one freakin' mile. I finally slowed to a walk, waiting for the pain to abate. By the time I got to the turn-around point about three-quarters of a mile down the path, I wasn't feeling any better. The walk back to the car was one of the most painful, frustrating times of this entire training process.

The week when that happened was like something out of Dickens...if he had written about a middle-aged, overweight, single, 21st Century woman training for her first 5k. "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times..." At the beginning of that week, I managed to pull off a hat trick: three consecutive 5k runs in as many days. I thought that perhaps running every day instead of every other day was really going to do the trick here. Every single running attempt after that was absolute crap. I'd manage to run maybe a mile, a mile and a quarter. I might have made it a mile and a half one day. I was feeling worse and worse, and then my body decided to kick me (in the shins, no less) when I was down: shin splints. I figured that since I'd gone nearly 6 months without ever encountering them, I was in the clear. "HAH!" said my legs. (Yes, they talk...damn near incessantly when I run. And, yes, I talk back to them...with a vocabulary that will garner an R rating from the MPAA.) This time, I had to listen to my legs: rest, ice, elevation, ibuprofen (prescription-strength ibu). As you can probably imagine from reading about my experience with the "patience" and "frustration" concepts, I don't do well with rest...unless there's a "Law & Order" marathon on TNT...which tends to happen only on days when I don't need to be chillaxin' on the sofa like a comatose three-toed sloth.

Returning to running after a few days of not running should feel better than it did, but I still felt like Sisyphus pushing that damn boulder up the hill. One test for me was running on the hottest day of the year so far. Now, a sensible person would have looked at the ambient temperature, relative humidity, dew point, heat index, wind speed and direction—meteorological science that serves a great benefit to humankind, if only to keep us from doing something that could result in heat stroke. I saw the ambient temperature was 95 degrees, but there was a nice breeze blowing and it didn't seem oppressively humid, so I went for it. I'd been focusing on extra hydrating for days and I told myself I would only run as much as I was comfortable, since my real goal that day was just to see how I would acclimate to the heat. I managed to run a total of about a mile and a quarter; much better than I had anticipated. I called my sister (just in case I was going to collapse from the heat after all) and she told me the dew point was 72 degrees (I usually can't stand the humidity when the dew point gets over 50) and the heat index was 105 degrees. Now, had I known those two pieces of information beforehand, I would have bagged the whole session; I probably wouldn't even have walked in that, much less ran in it. Considering the actual running/walking experience I had, though, it was probably a good thing that I didn't know how bad things were; it gave me an opportunity to stay tuned in to how my body felt in those conditions. Aside from profuse sweating, it really wasn't all that bad; all things considered, I would have expected to have been much worse.

So yesterday I finally managed to run the full 5k distance again. Granted, you could have timed me with a sundial, but I finished and ran the whole thing...and right now, that's all I care about. I'd still like to be able to run every day, but I'll be more sensible about building up that kind of mileage gradually (another of those patience-like concepts with which I struggle). On non-running days I ride my bike, usually cycling about 14½ miles. That, too, feels more remedial than it did last year. But the cross-training has clearly benefited not only my emotional state regarding the upcoming FR4W, it has also slightly improved my confidence. I'm finally starting to feel that maybe I really can do this.

And then, eight days later, I'll run my second official 5k. More on that another time.

Thanks to everyone who has offered moral support. There are some days when that seems to be the only thing enabling me to put one foot in front of the other for five kilometers.