Confessions of a Struggling Runner 💕

I want to run. To do what I always do, have always done, for the last ten years of my life. Escape, flee into the shadows, run happy, run free. 

But this time, I’m tired of struggling with running because I must.💜 

I want to run for me, for the love of the run.

Confession, I don’t think the marathon distance is for me anymore, or at least now. And I’m not even upset about it.

I loved E V E R Y T H I N G about my training. I found my true strength during that training cycle, which felt awesome. But this time, this time is so different, and at the end of my list of reasons why is a simple, “I’m just not into it.”

Now let’s not confuse that with I don’t love running anymore, because I do. I love the speed workouts and random “I feel like running” runs.💙 I just don’t love the long runs. Why? My mind wants to go, but my body not so much, and it seems like God is telling me that it’s just not my thing or my time…

Among the crazy list of reasons why I’m not meant to be a marathon runner at this time is my heart💓. Running after any injury is ridiculously hard. It’s been so frustrating. When it comes to long runs, I struggle. It isn’t getting easier. For some reason, it seems that in every long run of this training cycle, something goes wrong, or something happens that causes me to get in my head, and then I can’t get out. Yesterday, about three-plus km into my run, I got fed up with my Garmin. It was telling me my pace was 12 minutes, it didn’t matter if I sprinted or stopped, it stayed on 12. And it was messing with me mentally. 😵

I don’t even know if I was actually three-plus km into my run. I wanted to quit. I was annoyed with myself. My stubbornness didn’t want to stop my watch and start it again because then I would lose the total km of the run. I was getting so frustrated with the stop-and-go. It’s so darn hard.

I’m not giving up on marathons or maybe even ultras. And I will finish my next 21.1km. I’m just going to take it day by day, and get back to running because I want to, not because I have to. 

It’s time to change gears up for a little and redirect my focus!

Don't quit

So many people choose to quit. 

Choose to stop living. 

They're really cheating themselves, you know. 

People don't really understand what they can accomplish if they want to. They have no idea how talented they are. 

I think you find another side of yourself when you actually put your heart💓 into something. That's one of the things that makes running unique...it's one of the few times when you actually meet the challenge of doing something that is probably the most physically and mentally challenging thing you've ever done. 

For me, I can't recall anything more complicated than finishing a half marathon. That's why I've done so many of them. It's one of the few times in my life when I've felt entirely self-fulfilled.

My ♥ heart is running it's own marathon

Some months ago, I became alarmed with my own heartbeat💓. 

Sometimes, during relaxation, the heart skipped beats: instead of a nice steady oooooooo, I had an interrupted oo oo oo. 

Recently, however, the irregular or skipped heartbeats had been returning to a greater degree and also not always whilst resting. 

Accompanying these symptoms was an apparent dip in fitness, typically about a minute over 5km, but anything up to about 10%. Anyone who runs or trains regularly would be somewhat concerned by this alone and should be asking themselves a few questions about the training they are doing.

To encourage my heart💓to behave, I cut the training more than usual and completely cut out caffeine (known to upset heart rhythm). 

On my last night race and after a short warm-up, standing at the start, I could feel the tell-tale signs of my skipped beats, and sure enough, as I stood there with a finger on the pulse, I could feel my heart regularly missing one beat in three. 

Was I worried? Strangely not really, maybe my mind was more occupied with the thought of finishing the race. Unsurprisingly, I was slower than I should have been by about 10%. Sure, it felt hard (as it always will), but I’m not sure if my perceived effort was affected by some unconscious worry — probably it was. So, that little episode convinced me to do one thing: Visit the GP.

The result was that I tore a muscle in my heart💔; the ECG confirmed this. Sometimes, we never know why certain things affect us the way they do. Nevertheless, taking a bit of time off from running seems a natural thing to do. I will, of course, expect to lose a bit of fitness, but I’ve not been responding too well to training lately anyway, so there’s not much to lose in the short term.

So this is where I am right now. I’m scared but hopeful. It’s funny how something I thought was no big deal and probably something semi-normal in other athletes turned out to be a totally freaky thing pretty much confined to a select lucky few.