The 'Adjustment Period' of Running.
The way I see it, running is like the opposite of a relationship. When you start out with a new partner, you enter the honeymoon period filled with love and excitement and immediately get rose coloured glasses firmly planted over your eyes. It seems like everything is blissfully perfect, until somewhere along the path cracks start to show. With running on the other hand, there's no way around the fact that in many ways the start sucks. Not only is breathing scarily difficult, sweat more abundant, and heart rates sky high; but you get to become reacquainted with the pain of muscles microtearing and fixing themselves on a daily basis. For me, this has meant waking up being unable to walk without the pressure and pain in my calves forcing me into a robot shuffle for the first 5 minutes of the day. Navigating stairs has once again become a mission of sweet talking my quads and hamstrings into moving as they are designed to, and I am drop-dead tired most nights.
When each day became a gift.
Total: 15.2km in 60 mins. 38 laps of a track. In the middle parts of the workout where the speeds were fastest, I hit an 18:25 5km split, a 38:19 10km split, and a 59:15 15km. 12 months ago my PB's over those distances in races weren't even that fast; let alone at 30 degrees celsius, 3000m altitude, at night, alone, on a treadmill. I lie back and shut my eyes, trying to take in the moment of again realising that after all the doubts and fears going into this session, I am again more capable that I realised. The only reason I now know that, is because I threw caution to the wind and had a crack. A tear comes to my eyes as the exhausted relief sets in, and I make the connection that right now, in my day to day being and doing, I am genuinely living the life my 8 year old self dreamed of.