The fourth best day of the week

The bad news is that we're still taking cold showers. I'm going to call again today, because I'm getting a bit tired of this.

The good news is that I had an amazing run this morning. Great runs always make me happy, but they make me especially happy when they come at the end of a long dearth of good runs. It has been over five week since I have recorded a great run, which is an unusually long time for me, and what made it even harder was that most of the runs I took in those five weeks would not even qualify as good runs. I felt tired, my legs were stiff, my knee was hurting and felt unstable. To some extent, this is just part of being a runner. Sometimes my body needs a rest, and I can either take that rest willingly, or fight it and be forced to rest by injury. But when the down times last longer than a week or two for no apparent reason (I wasn't overtraining, I wasn't eating poorly, I wasn't any more stressed than usual) it's hard not to wonder if things will ever return to normal. In my impatience, it's easy to lose perspective and become melodramatic - What if I never recover? What if my running days are over for good? What if I'm stuck on the elliptical machine for the rest of my life?

For the most part, I know that those thoughts are ridiculous and they stay safely in the back of my head. But it's always a relief when a run like today's run finally comes. The weather was wonderful - the temperature was still cool enough to wear long sleeves, but warm enough to forego the gloves and warm enough for shorts; the weather was overcast but not rainy; I felt strong and fast, and I ran a route I haven't been on for months, which is always kind of nice. I am still going to play it safe for a little while longer, not run every day, do the elliptical machine, give myself a little time to heal fully. I'd rather have two or three good runs a week than five or six miserable runs, and I like to think that if I can make myself be patient just a little longer, I will be back up to speed a lot sooner.

In the meantime, the semester is trotting along to an end. I really don't know how I'm going to get everything done in the next three weeks, but that's how semesters always end, and somehow, no matter how painful, things always get done. And then it will be summer for four whole months - Hawaii, road trips with Kelsey, sunshine, bicycle rides, late sunsets and early sunrises, reading books, teaching classes. For all that I can make it through another month.