This week marks week ten, and it’s been a surprising amount of change in ten weeks.
Just when I thought I was progressing, that I was done regressing, I’ve realized I’m in a place of more and more regression. When I started this, I was hoping to run a 100k by week sixteen. Now, at week ten, most of my runs are forty minutes or less, and I’ve given up on a long run entirely until I feel ready for it — really ready.
On the one hand, it feels good to be respecting the recovery window. Controlling my easy runs, controlling my intensity sessions. Right now that means runs under forty minutes, and recovery runs that are literally two miles.
In a really good conversation with one of my runners this week, we talked about how sometimes you just know that the thing you’re doing isn’t working anymore. That’s where I’m at. Running too hard in my workouts, too hard in my easy runs, never enough recovery — it’s not working. After thirty years of grinding away, maybe respecting what I need now is what lets me run for another thirty.
But on the other hand, I’ve got some serious FOMO. There was a sweet picture in the Island Endurance group chat of some of our runners up at the Kusam Klimb on Vancouver Island, and it just looked like such a wonderful day. Three of the runners I coach were also there. It’s hard knowing that’s not what my body wants me to do right now.
Every injured runner knows there’s a price of admission to the running community, and it’s being able to run. I’m still grateful that I can — I was on the track twice last week doing controlled threshold work. But there’s a part of me that wishes my ability to run more was still there. I’m trying to have some faith that it comes back.
Regardless, what I was doing before wasn’t working. In Buddhism there’s the idea of a choiceless choice — when you have real clarity, there isn’t actually a decision to make. You can be unhappy about how things are and wish they were otherwise, but once you see clearly, you already know the right thing to do. That’s what this is for me right now. I can wish it were different. But I know what it is.
I’m using Claude as a daily training and rehab log — tracking morning stiffness, pain levels, sessions, and patterns in real time. These blog posts are written with Claude’s help, pulling from that ongoing log each week.
