Real David H.

Earlier this year when I was training for the Shamrock Half Marathon, I stayed relatively quiet. Sometimes — most of the time — it’s best to just STFU and run.
No analyzing. No complaining. Not too boastful. Not too hard on myself.

Just run. Sometimes fast, sometimes slow, sometimes both in the same run.

The reason I’ve made the somewhat conscious choice to not talk about it so much is because it’s easy to fall into a trap of obsessing about things. The past few days are perfect examples of how I could easily let my thoughts get a little out of control.

• Nearly a week after the Virginia 10 Miler, I was feeling like I was running in mud. Going nowhere very fast. I cut Saturday’s planned 16 miles short by a mile because it sucked so bad. I was hot, I felt slow, there was absolutely nothing right about it.
• The next day I filed that run to a special place in my memory, left the watch at home and felt much better. Plus the weather was tremendously nicer (read: cooler), I put on some tunes and just ran for the fun of it. Perfect way to reset myself.
• Today normally would have been a day off, but since I’m off work (thanks Mr. Columbus!) I headed out mid-morning for 6 miles and included a sub 8-minute mile tempo run for 4 miles. Quite the opposite of how I felt Saturday. It was in the upper 40s and rainy too, and not once did I think about the weather being bad.

I know that running has a tons of ups and downs — it’s so rare to find that middle ground sometimes. In the past 3 days I’ve experienced all three.

It’s quite exhausting sometimes going from one extreme to another, which makes me eager to get to the start line of the Richmond Marathon to put everything together and let loose. Then I can get back to talking a little more.