It’s been more than a month since I posted, almost two months even. I’ve skipped the entire month of July, despite knocking out at least a couple adventures, including my 50k (31 miles) challenge, one of my goals for the year. Let’s face it though, the heat has been high, and motivation has been low.
When I was in the US in mid-June, I had to make a choice about when to attempt the 50k due to the trip’s timing in relation to my training. The dilemma: extend my training another week or use the trip as a prolonged recovery and try to hold on to the fitness I had? The first option would have entailed pushing for an additional 20-mile (32 km) run while traveling. It would have also given me an extra week to recover from the inevitable jet lag I would experience on my return, but it could have pushed me too close to the hot summer temps. The second option meant running the 50k the week after I returned, potentially jet lagged and tired from the travel.
In the end, I chose the second option for a few reasons: 1) I was dependent on others for transportation and planning a 20-mile (32 km) run around the travel days and where we were staying without inconveniencing anyone but myself was just impossible. 2) Most available options were main roads or trails. I didn’t feel that running on the main roads was a safe option, and although I like trails, if I happened across a rattlesnake while running, I might literally not be able to continue that run or any subsequent run until I returned to Spain. 3) I wanted to do other things, like hiking and climbing and socializing. 4) To avoid the heat later in the summer. 5) Finally and most importantly, I just wanted to be done with training.
Before heading to the US, my time was pretty much consumed with training. Instead of traveling or hiking or caving, I was running both days every weekend. Before last year when I trained for running Cuerda Larga, I hadn’t really trained in such a formal way for running in a long time, maybe 10 years or more.
Happy running and buggy humid running in the US
In the month or so before the trip, running had taken on a sort of manic-depressive note. Sometimes it was simply great. I felt happy, confident, strong, and amazed at what I was able to accomplish. Never in my life would I have believed I could run 16 miles (25 km) one day and go out for another 6 miles (10 km) plus some light sprints the following day and end feeling better than when I started. Yet on other days, I was left feeling completely out of my range. I’d think that maybe this goal was too hard for me, that I’d never accomplish it, and that I’d add yet another missed goal to an ever-growing list.
A week before I planned to run my 50k, I left the US in a frantic disaster—delayed flight, panicked running through the airport, lost luggage. After several days worrying that my luggage with much of my running gear might never be found, I finally got it three days before my planned run, choosing to wait in a two-hour-long line at the airport instead of risking that they couldn’t deliver it to my house before the weekend.
Mud, mud, so much mud
Before heading to the US, I had considered running a 48k route along a fire road, called the Horizontal, in the mountains outside of Madrid, but in the flurry surrounding the trip, I hadn’t really mapped out the route or investigated the water availability. In addition, during that less-than-relaxing week after the trip, I realized it had been a week since I had run. After all that time invested in training, I was concerned that the chances of reaching my goal were starting to crumble away.
In the end, I opted to just run 50k in Casa de Campo, the large park here in Madrid where I often run during the week and on the weekends. It has ample access to water, and I could easily create three 10-mile (16 km) loops or out-and-back segments without covering much of the same terrain due to the number of route options in the park. This would also allow my partner to meet me at a designated location after each “lap” to give me snacks and cold drinks.
Post-run recovery in the US and home
That Sunday, I woke up nice and early at 4:30 to eat and digest before starting at 6. Although I had gone on a short shake-out run the day before, I could feel the lack of both running and sleep. I felt sluggish and a little heavy in the legs. But the cool morning felt great as I jogged along the loose rocks and packed, sandy soil, the sun rising behind me. On the way back to the lake, where I would meet my partner, I finally saw a few other people running and cycling.
My heavy legs and overall sluggishness never really improved as I had hoped throughout that first lap. After 11 (18 km) miles, I felt as if I had already done 20 (32). Yet I chose to continue because I hoped they at least wouldn’t get much worse. After a snack and some iced tea, I chose to head out on my second impromptu lap, legs be damned. And so it went, more or less the same as before, but with more people, more sun, and often less desire to keep running—parts were entertaining, like seeing a fox and the many rabbits, which I always enjoy, but most of it wasn’t. I imagine this is why people prefer to run actual races where they can cheer on others and be cheered on as well, experience an iota of camaraderie, and see different scenery than what they see every day (depending on the race, I suppose).
Early morning runs and run commuting
Before my last lap, I walked a few hundred meters with my partner to the public restroom near the lake to chat and take a little break. Since the longest I had run in this training cycle had only been about this distance, my body was saying, “Okay, we stop now, right? This is when we go home and lay down, no?” Instead, I exited the bathroom and in a teary whisper said, “I don’t want to keep going.” But to stop just because I wanted to in that moment would be such a waste of those months and months of training. So I continued, trying to focus on even smaller segments—the farthest I had run this training cycle, just making it to my turnaround point, and hitting the marathon distance, which made every step afterward the farthest I had ever run.
My last turn-around point was a little short of the planned 5 (8 km) miles, and instead of continuing along the hillier and sunnier end of the park to hit that target, I returned and finished out the 50k with a few laps around the lake. At one point, I thought, “You just have to finish this and then you never have to run again”—not “never have to run 50k again” but “never have to run again.”
Post 50k
I started running again just four days later because it wasn’t the running I was rejecting. It was the loneliness of striving for a goal on my own, the compromises, that feeling of watching my partner head off without me on adventure after adventure each weekend. It was being left without my main source of encouragement as I shuffled through those seemingly never-ending months of training miles. It was the challenge of being forced to confront and manage my own negative, self-defeating, and self-abusive thoughts without that in-the-moment support I had grown so used to. I did it all on my own, which was valuable, important, and above all, exhausting. As I ran around the lake, I noticed that my partner had not yet returned to our meeting spot, and with each lap, I wondered if he would make it. Coming around the final turn of that final lap, I saw that he hadn’t. I wasn’t disappointed. I finished my 50k goal just as I had worked toward it—on my own—and as I finally sat down and took of my running pack, I said to myself, “Look at all you have done. I couldn’t be prouder.”
