This Is Why You Don't Give Up

"The minute you think about giving up, think about why you held on for so long."


The past week of my life has amazed me. And I for one am astounded. I never actually thought that I would be able to run like I used to again. I figured that I'd be a recreational runner for the rest of my life. Not racing, just trotting 3 miles every other day to keep myself in shape.

But before I get to that I'd like to start with the past six days or so. Once my physical therapist assured me that as long as I work on my form nothing bad could happen to my knees I took it as the "o.k. go" to start biking as much as I wanted. Last Wednesday I got it into my head that I wanted to see if I could do 50 miles. I figured I could but that was the most I had ever biked (yeah, yeah, I  know I'm a novice). So then from there it was like "can I do 100 in two days?" so....I did. I thought that would satisfy it. Until.... "can I do 150 in 3 days?" By the end of day 3 I was at 165. I celebrated at the 200 mile mark at day 4 until calling it quits at 43 miles. Day 5 I took it easy with 30 and at day 6 I did another 60. Bringing my grand total to 298 in 6 days. If you add in the miscellaneous biking that I did from my apartment to my college I'm easily at the 300 mark this week.

What's more confusing is that I feel awesome. Like i never have felt before. I don't remember feeling better after so much exercise in a long time.

So today I hopped on the Alter-G for my weekly run. Now, usually, I've been running at about 55% of my body weight and at the lowest 7 minutes-ish per mile. Which is respectable (remember that the less of your body weight the easier it is to go fast. But today two things happened which normally did not. 1.) We cranked it up to 65% of my body weight (i.e. I didn't feel like I was just floating in the air for once). and 2.) Seven minute pace felt slow. Really slow. So did 6:50. And 6:40. Somehow I settled into my run at 6:30 pace. In the last mile I cranked it down to 6:22. But here's what I don't understand: it felt really, really easy. I can't remember the last time that I ran 6.5 miles at 6:30 pace and felt awesome. Even during cross country season unless I was doing interval training I usually hovered around the 7 minute per mile mark.

I feel like I should be more excited about what kind of shape I'm apparently in, but all I can think about is how this possibly happened...and how it happened after 300 miles of biking I will never know.

But this is the lesson I learned: There's always a reason to not give up, as I was so close to doing.

So my dearest legs, I'm sorry for almost giving up on you. Thanks for not giving up on me.