I finally get it!

Today's run: 4.9km in I-have-no-idea-how-long

Today was a long day at work. It was school photo day, so that meant getting up fifteen minutes earlier at 5:15am to make myself pretty! Then my day started with a parent interview at 7:30am and the entire rest of the day was taken up with student interviews. Follow that with a faculty meeting after school for an hour and a half, and I'm surprised I made it home in one piece. Often I leave school with at least some energy, but after a half an hour drive home, anything remaining is well and truly gone...

But tonight, strangely, I still felt alright when I got home. A miracle! So I decided to change straight away and get a run in. If I sit on the couch for even 5 minutes it's a dangerous thing, so it is to be avoided at all costs if I want to run. Off I head, down the three floors of stairs in my apartment block. Bottom floor. Damn, no watch. Now, as a maths teacher I love nothing better than having lots of numbers to put into nice graphs and charts and tables to measure stuff about my running, so not having a watch bothered me. The most bothersome thing about it is entering a distance for my run but no time. Oh well, I think, you can cope without a watch this once, and it's three floors back up. I walk a little further down the street, still thinking about turning around to go back and get the watch, but decide against it. On I go.

As soon as I started running tonight, for reasons unknown to me, I started running with a different style. And it just felt good. Smooth. Powerful. More 'bouncy' rather than a shuffle. Energetic. More efficient. Faster. In all the years that I have been running off and on, I have had moments of 'brilliance' like this where things have felt goof, but it has never lasted past 100m. Either I lose my form, or energy or both. Today, I kept expecting that sooner rather than later I would run out of steam and my old shuffle would return..... but it just never happened.

It's funny, I have always been adament in calling what I do "running", but in reality when I say it's a bit of a shuffle, it's not far off the truth. Today, for the first time, it really felt like running. It felt good!

Long live the good runs! Now I wonder how long this little breakthrough can sustain my interest and motivation, cos no doubt there'll be a crap run coming my way soon now!

PS. And after such a good run, no way of checking whether it was a PB for that route, or whether in fact I felt faster vs actually ran faster! Pooh!