I love my body – RunningWell

Hi All!

Happy June! We have the longest days of the year coming up now – enjoy the light! Speaking of longest days, there are a few LES teams registered for the Longest Day Ekiden relay at the spit on the 21^st. It’s a fun community event that brings running clubs together. Check out our fbook page for details or if you’re not on fbook email me and I’ll send you detes.

Recently I’ve been thinking about how grateful I am for my body. Training is so cool because you can actually see in real time the adaptations that your body has made. I’ll admit I am only noticing this in swimming and biking because after 30+ years of running, I might be at the diminishing visible returns end of work/adaptation. But I just think it’s so neat to see yourself be able to do something that a year or even months go you could never fathom doing. Just by introducing the gradual stress to your body! Your good old body says “ok – if this is what you’re up to, I’ll help you out”. And it gets to work in building more mitochondria, more nerve pathways to your muscles, thicker muscle fibres, more capillaries to help you to go further …

I like thinking of my body as my friend. Sure, sometimes I’m disappointed when she doesn’t perform as I’d planned, but she’s trying! There is no little muscle fibre or nerve pathway that isn’t firing and doing their job to keep me alive. Our systems don’t know the difference between running a race for fun and running from a bear – once you have adrenaline and start to run, millions of coordinated cells go into action and give their lives in doing the best job they can. I have so much gratitude for that. Our bodies’ only goal is our survival and success in life.

And yet we abuse them. We sometimes ingest things we shouldn’t. We often don’t feed them what we should. We don’t give them enough rest. We push on when they’re sending signals that they’re faltering. We have high demands and are not always kind in return. Even when we get sick, our bodies go into over-drive, fighting for our lives. And we get frustrated that meanwhile, they aren’t letting us run and workout.

I love my body. I really truly am grateful for all the work she does for me. I know I ask a lot. But I’m going to try to remember to treat her as a close friend and ally – she really is doing the best she can.

On to tomorrow’s workout – back to Pottery Rd Hills!

It’s been a while since we’ve done these ones. Let’s just go steady up, steady down.

If you’re training for a longer event, aim for consistent effort and nudge up the volume.

If you’re training for 5K/10K’s, do a lower quantity and aim for every other one HARD.

If you’ve recently completed a marathon or half marathon, just steady and keep the volume on the low end as you get back into things.

I’ll aim to be there at around 6:15. Just start going once you get there – we’ll meet somewhere on the hill!

Seanna