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| Banook in Mist (Sesshu 1420-1506) |
Woke up yesterday to thick fog – so thick you could see the
granules of moisture floating in the air. Forecast said it might rain in the
afternoon, so I laced up for a morning recovery run. I’ve got a 10k route that
winds through Sullivan’s Pond, along the Lake Banook boardwalk, along the
Shubie trail by Lake Micmac, around a wee loop and back. The conditions were amazing.
It’s that time of year again: season of mists and mellow fruitfulness...
and marathons (can you picture Keats cranking out mile 26 in a frilly shirt?).
The fog was obscuring everything – casting its veil of unfamiliarity over a
running route I’ve done hundreds of times. I couldn’t see the far shore of
Banook –as I ran the boardwalk, a canoeist emerged from the void. I’m a sucker
for the Canadian aesthetic – flawless paddle stroke on a silent, foggy lake –
the boat’s V wake vanishing into the mist.
With all the moisture in the air, the night spider webs were
heavy with water beads. Along the Shubie trail there were hundreds or normally
hidden webs revealed in the tall grass. I couldn’t help but thinking how much
flying insects must love the fog – while it obscures the landscape, it reveals
fatal dangers for them. I can’t imagine life is easy for flying insects
generally – nice for them to get an easy day.
And I was having an easy day too – after punishing myself
with an overly quick threshold run on Wed, I needed to make sure my recovery
was not too fast. I tend to run my recoveries needlessly quick. I read once
that the best way to make sure you run slowly on recoveries is to make your
workouts especially difficult – that way you’ll be so broken on off days that
you won’t be able to do anything but run slowly. I must admit, I’m both
attracted to and repulsed by this kind of bravado – but it served me well
yesterday... my recovery run was barely faster than 5:00/k – a great pace for
recovery (for me). I doubt, however, that continuous flogging in workouts will
become a training method for me – I’m not 20 anymore; I don’t recover quickly.
And I don’t have the discipline (or fanaticism) to push that hard in every
workout!
I’ll take today off – let the micro tears knit themselves –
and then crank ‘er up again tomorrow.
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