We Begin Again, Constantly

I lost my running coach.  While I would have expected to be devastated by such a turn of events, I feel strangely liberated.  I didn't even know it at the time, but when I was working with him, there was something I was fighting against.  Myself.

I asked him to coach me because I wanted him to push me and help me push myself.  But the approach of mind mastering body was creating a hostile relationship between the two.  My mind would push my body, and my body would push back.  Sunday's disaster was a supreme example.  And that is not how I want to live.  I want to cultivate a relationship where my mind, body, and spirit work together in harmony.  I want to kindly ask my body to perform and have it respond, not demand obedience only to have it rebel.  As I no longer have a coach to listen to, I am recommitting myself to listening to my body, believing that it will reward me by rising to the occasion when I ask it to.

I don't yet know what this will mean for my running plan...or whether I will try to find another coach.  My training calendar is once again a clean slate, and there are no rules.  I get to decide whether I want to resurrect the mile/month plan.  I have the option of including strength training and cross-training, both of which were casualties of working with a coach whose primary focus was on running and who forbid other types of training on designated rest days.  There are a myriad of different kinds of speed workouts I can play with, balancing mixing things up with repeating the same workouts so I can see my progress.  There are as many approaches to training for a marathon as there are coaches, and I've been reading about different philosophies, which I may try to synthesize into a plan that I believe will work for me.  I will gratefully take what I learned from my coach in the time that I had the opportunity to work with him and see how I can use that moving forward.  It's a little scary to be on my own again...but also very freeing.

And I have a little time to figure things out.  I gutted out 8 excruciating miles yesterday, hobbling along with a bad ankle (probably tweaked going down a muddy hill on Sunday) and plantar fasciitis.  I can barely walk now.  So, the first step in listening to my body is to take a day off!  Hopefully, I'll be back to good this weekend...