Monday, August 22, 2005

FARMER'S MARKET

In Self-Made Olympian, Daws talks about Ron Clarke (or was it Ron Hill?) training with two other guys under Lydiard. During the base phase they went out for a run at 7:00 pace. After they got in better shape, Ron picked up the pace while the other two guys stayed at 7:00 pace. They all improved, but Ron went on to set a bunch of World Records. The moral: listen to your body. When you get more fit, you pace should naturally come down.

With that said, I pushed the pace a little more than “normal” during my nice 5 mile run over lunch. It wasn’t a tempo run, but rather one of the “comfortably exhausting” workouts. One of the things I have to work on is getting my head around the fact that while the pace feels fast, I’m really not working any harder than when I wasn’t as fit. I have to turn off the “I’m going too fast” switch in my head.

Jim sent me a rebuttal email regarding my Letter to the Blogger post.

JIM: You know, I think runners sometimes confuse standings and statistics as values rather than symbols: symbols are supposed to represent achievement of the values we hold dear; the down side is that symbols are ephemeral and corruptible. I am a satisfied and successful runner, not because of standings, but because of the values that were important getting into this activity and what it has done for me personally: physical conditioning and athleticism, challenging myself to reach higher, opening myself to make friends, peace of mind, getting out of doors, genuine affirmation/validation, etc.

ME: You couldn’t be more right about what running has brought to my life as a whole. And if my blog was about all the benefits I’ve received, people I’ve met (especially the last 2 years), experiences I’ve enjoyed, then it'd be nothing but positives. But I try to focus my blog on the competitive side and obviously that’s not all positive. Maybe the “other stuff” would be a good post for next week – just to remind me and my readers that there’s more to running than the competitive side.







My Guidant race report got so long that I decided not to mention what we did afterwards. My friend Eric was playing with his band at the St. Paul Farmer’s Market. My family and I met Jim there. Eric's wife took a group picture of us, as well as this cute one of Katie (if I do say so myself).


Other photos can be found here. Eric is the bass player and fiddler who’s wearing the Nike Frees.

5 comments:

Chad said...

If anyone knows how to shrink photos via HTML, please let me know.

Thanks.

Beanie said...

Man, I'm just about to blog about that (the benefits of running) myself. I swear I'm not just copying you ;)
btw...that picture has made your blog look very odd - it's stretched it way out of shape..well at least in view I'm getting...

Beanie said...

oh, just use the 'compose' view when you are editing, and it should let you reduce it.

Chad said...

Thanks for the compose tip. Now the one of Katie looks good and expands when clicked on, but the group photo is fuzzy and doesn't expand. I need to do some more monkeying.

Chad said...

Yea, I some how figured it out.