My ambivalence toward writing this post--or really toward blogging in general recently--is clearly a reflection or manifestation of my recent ambivalence towards basically everything. As with many of us who are all too consumed with our running, whose general outlook fluctuates in rhythm with our training cycles, when my running isn't going well, I generally don't have much of an interest in anything else. It must be nice to be someone who derives pleasure or satisfaction from their job. What's that like?
I took three weeks off after Bandera. I tried to pretend that I wanted an offseason and felt great about my plan going forward, but to be honest I was floundering. I had no real desire to run and nothing really to train for, unsure if I'd be able to run Leadville and undecided as to whether I really wanted to. I gained enough weight that when I started running slowly again I felt bloated and awkward. I had nagging aches and pains in various areas and couldn't find any sort of consistent rhythm. Hearing about some of the great performances people were posting around the country and the world didn't help, either. I've been struggling with the usual crisis of confidence that follows any bad performance, and superimposing others' successes on that sense of failure was having less than positive effects.
Oh, and I didn't win Blogger of the Year. (Though I was a finalist for the second year in a row). Thanks to those who voted.
It took until March before some semblance of motivation returned. I decided to commit to Leadville and started to get at least a little excited about it. I had some very sub-par "quality" workouts, but at least I was getting out there again, and it was only a matter of time before things started clicking again.
And then I blew out my calf.
Well, that's a bit dramatic. I strained something that niggled on and off for a couple of weeks, causing me to cut short a couple of runs and gimp my way through a few others, until it finally seized up midway through a pretty decent tempo workout with Brian and I had to hobble a few miles back to the car. That laid me up for almost a week, but with some help from the brilliant Dave Ness and Scott Field at Performance Sports and Wellness, I've been back on my feet for almost two weeks, and I'm finally--finally--starting to find a little bit of fitness. Fortunately my ennui seems to have cleared a bit, and I'm actually starting to look forward to a spring and summer of training and racing.
I've had two other projects occupying the time that I'd usually devote towards the blog in recent months. One is the launch of a silly little podcast called The Pain Cave, which I conceived as a show that examines some of the scientific issues and bases behind endurance sports in general and ultrarunning in particular. It's been a challenge, and I've been having fun figuring it out and talking with some cool people--many of the characters you'll recognize from this blog, but also some other pretty interesting folks. I'd like to continue to keep talking about and de-mystifying the scientific stuff, but I'm also going to expand to just ultrarunning in general, especially in the next couple of weeks, so check that out. The other time suck I can't talk too much about right now; as you may know I've been doing some exercise physiology stuff recently and I'm working on a proposal to expand that into a much larger, more comprehensive running/sports medicine facility, which has been an exciting though uncertain prospect. Hopefully I'll have more to say about that in upcoming posts.
I do have some low-key races and other running-related fun coming up, so I anticipate some more regular posting soon. Plus next week Stuart Dutfield returns with a guest post on his 2018 to date. His diary from 2017 was one of the more bizarrely entertaining things I've read in awhile, so you've got that to look forward to at least.