By Means of the Sole

Last Sunday I had planned on finding a new trail to run in or around Houston, or maybe revisiting one if I had too. As I sat in my living room trying to figure out where to go, I felt unmotivated to drive far, and settled for running the gravel path around Memorial Park. I had run only five other miles in the week because of some funkiness in my knee, but with the issue under control, I wanted to at least get in another hour of running before the week expired. I made two decisions. I would settle for a relatively dull run around the park, but would treat myself to a trip out of town the next weekend for something different.

Fast-forward four days, and you’ve found me writing this from a coffee shop in Austin, Texas. I found a AirBnB in West Austin, taking out a room in a house full of dudes designing an app. I was really excited at the prospect of inserting myself in a “Silicon Valley” type situation, but alas, I have no high-stakes shenanigans to report (yet). What I do have to report is that I went on a delightful trail run not long after arriving, which I’ll report on a paragraph or two down.

On my drive from Houston to Austin, I picked up listening to “The Picture of Dorian Gray”. I started it last September, on my drive from Los Angeles to Houston. It’s a dark choice, but I saw a gorgeous and grotesque artist’s interpretation at the Chicago Art Institute last June and got inspired to read (listen to) Oscar Wilde’s gothic novel. ANYWHO, a character in the novel, Lord Henry, is dependable for accurate yet somewhat depressing descriptions of human behavior and beliefs, and he tells Gray at one point that the senses are a cure for the soul, and the soul a cure for the senses. I mulled this over, as I was driving to the Texas Hill Country to cure something that I was yearning for in my soul- a taste of adventure.

When things suck, for lack of a better word, when life just doesn’t feel right, I throw myself into something that will startle, refresh, or at least be distracting for, my senses. Watch something mindless, eat like its going out of style, or seek out some sort of companionship because being alone is just unbearable. Then there are more rare moments, where nothing is as interesting as what is going on internally, and I’m pushing away all the distractions at once, so I can figure out what is happening in the space between my ears. Unfortunately I think I live more in the former mode than the latter, and I think it would be nice to flip the situation. I’ll never figure the world out, but I think I have a fighting chance of nailing down what really makes me tick someday.

Trail Running often joins those two extremes. Outside, alone on the trails I experience life first hand.  The sensory experience of the world is limited to how I take it in, no memes or sitcoms to interpret human behavior for me. This is how I get closer to answering, “Who am I”? For the record, I still am not sure.

Today’s run was great. About a mile in, as I was mulling over life events and major decisions, I crossed paths with two people on a tandem mountain bike, and they warned me about a rattlesnake they had seen. I tried to be chill about it at first, but called out as they rode off, “ON THE TRAIL?”

“YES!” they shouted back.

Yikes. I came across a freakin’ alligator on a trail not too long ago, and that was startling, but this gave me the willies. The trail had a decent amount of overgrown single track, and I didn’t feel comfortable letting myself zone out with my thoughts for the rest of the run, so I didn’t. I paid heavy attention to every step, taking in as much detail of the ground as I could with each move forward. I never saw the snake, but for my efforts in avoiding it, I caught sight of a bunny that held still as long as I needed to snap a picture, and as I turned to resume the run, three deer bounded right in front of me! If I hadn’t been looking for the snake, I wouldn’t have seen the bunny, and if I hadn’t stopped for the bunny, I might have missed the deer.

I have two more days of running to do here, and I’m really looking forward to them. Whether I see something new or think something new, its all good. Lord Henry was right, sometimes we need to get away from all the input, and other times its great to get out of ourselves.

THE RUN:

Slaughter Creek Preserve Trail

Wildlife! It didn’t move from the moment I caught sight of it until I ran off.
This was my favorite view of the whole run.
The trail wound in and out of woods.
I appreciated the chance to get on some technical terrain.

 

 

 

Do the Things. Run the Miles.

Recently I posted a picture to Instagram of a post-it I placed on my mirror a few months ago, with a phrase I’ve lived by for years. It reads,

“Do the things you don’t want to do, to do the things you do want to do”.

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This has been on my mirror since I moved to Houston. I wanted to be more active in making my life what I wanted it to be, no longer relying on luck or chance for good things to happen.

Yesterday I struggled to start my 8 mile run. I wavered back and forth. The plan had been to run to a local run club (2.8), do mileage with them (3), and finish off the mileage on the way home, walking the difference once I reached the 8 mile mark. At 3pm I was sure I was going. By 4pm I was fading and ready to cave. I took a quick 25 minute nap, just dozing, while my thoughts nagged at me. It wasn’t even the distance that really bothered me, it was the time. For no particular reason I was in a cranky mood with negative running rampant, and I didn’t want to be alone with just my brain for that long! In the end I realized I wasn’t going to change my attitude by skipping the run, so I just did the damn thing.

“How will I feel if I go to bed and I didn’t work on (insert task) today”? This question catches all the excuses that my motivational post-it doesn’t. I can procrastinate, and put most things off till tomorrow, without dire results. When I know I let opportunities or time windows go by, I get anxious. At some point, I got sick of feeling that way, and though my way of living now is pretty intense, I go to bed every night feeling confident in the direction that I’m heading.

 

IN OTHER NEWS:

I ran a last minute trail 5k that was part of the San Felipe Shootout with Trail Racing over Texas this past weekend. I signed up for it at 8pm the night before the race. It was a good move. The 5k was part of a larger event, the “Shootout”, which consisted of a 5k, followed by a 10k and a ½ marathon. Many talented runners showed up, and I had to work harder to keep up. I went out too fast, but was glad I did- I saw the 10k go out, and realized that if I had held back I would have gotten caught in a cluster-fJck in the first couple hundred meters! My pace in the second and third mile suffered because of the fast first – times were: 7:39/8:18/8:09. Not bad for me on trail, it was definitely the fastest I’ve run off road up till now, but I still need to work on getting my mile times both closer together and faster within a race.

Saw the 10k heading out as I left. This is the runners waiting on people to descend a narrow passage. Thanked myself for going out in front because this would have not been fun to wait on.
I’m all about the data and the pacing. I need to rely less on my watch, though, and more on how I feel.

Trail Run & Training Progress

Much like the unstructured trail run I went on last weekend, I’m just going to start writing this blog post and see where I wind up.

 

Right now I’m just focusing on endurance, attitude, and form. The individual runs are relatively unstructured, allowing me to hone in on those aspects. Rather than holding a specific pace for intervals, I’m just going for an overall zone each run. Next month I will start to add in interval workouts, necessitating putting down more detail in advance, but right now I’m enjoying the process of just going for a run without performance expectations.

 

Last Sunday I had a trail run scheduled, but I didn’t know where I was going until that morning. I had some backup ideas in case I wasn’t divinely inspired, but I didn’t need them. I glanced at the list of trails listed in the front of the book, and picked a park to head to, not even sure which route I would take once I got there. I had selected Huntsville State Park, north of Houston. My first trail run when I moved back to Houston was near the park, and I hadn’t been back to the area since. In my head it was maybe an hour north, but I wound up driving quite a ways, over an hour and a half, listening to Hidden Brain podcasts during the drive.

 

I arrived at the park, was given a trail map with closed portions highlighted, and parked at the first spot I saw next to a trail head. I kinda had an idea, looking at the map, that I would run out on the Chinquapia Trail, a 6.8 mile loop around the lake, but might turn back after 3 miles because part of the loop was closed. I forgot all this. The beginning of my run was kind of confusing. If you look at the map, you’ll see that the arrow pointing north is on the diagonal. As I ran and crossed certain paths and landmarks, things weren’t jiving in my head, so I just meandered, somehow still staying on Chinquapia without really trying to.

 

This was my favorite trail run so far in Texas, and I will be back. The ground is great, with technical stuff to maneuver, like roots and rocks. The path winds, it’s never fully single track but really fun to navigate all the same. I got so lost in my enjoyment of running this trail that I forgot to turn back at my 3 mile mark, and when I got to the closed off portion of the trail, realized I could still make a loop (see map below), but I’d be adding 2 miles to my run. Oh, well- if I was feeling tired or sore I could walk. A big portion of this training phase is not overdoing it- I want to get to interval training energized and ready to work hard. I had only planned on running 16 miles total for the week, and 5.5 for the day, but wound up running that last two making my total mileage for the week 17.7 with the day’s run being a total of 7.2. I called the run before reaching my car, deciding I’d tacked on enough extra mileage, and walked about another ¾ of a mile to finally get back to my car.

 

I had my first fall since breaking my ankle in 2015! I’m excited because I came up without a scratch and more importantly without any muscle or tendon injury. This was super exciting. The fall itself was surreal, I tripped over a root, and time froze as I wondered whether I was going to be able to find my footing or go down. I went down, and didn’t fight it. This is the way I typically fell in the past, not trying some awkward footing last minute to save myself a little scratching or bruising. I did try to stop the fall when I had the ankle break, and I hope that lesson to just let the fall happen sticks forever.

 

Finally, last month I decided to pull back on the intensity of my training, while still progressing with distance, and this month I’m seeing positive results. My average pace is dropping, I’m recovering faster, and focusing on form has led to me running faster even though it feels like I’m putting in less effort.

 

Lesson:

  • Evaluate where you are and where you want to be. Create a plan that makes sense to take you there. Harder doesn’t always mean better, but smarter usually does!

 

One of the benefits of having a plan is that I never wonder if I should go for a run. Its right there in front of me, the next step I need to take to be the kind of runner I want to be.

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The route I ran is marked in Blue. There was a little more steady incline on the back end (Green Route/Triple C Trail), otherwise little hills throughout. A really FUN RUN!