Janathon '12 - 9: So, this running thing, eh?

So, after a weekend off, how to ease back into Janathon as we know it?

Frankly, I'd had a rubbish day on Monday. Not bad bad, just drained, tired, short on ability to focus and high on propensity for mind to wander. I got home at half five feeling, quite honestly, like going straight to bed. But no, there's this small matter of running to do. Hmmm...

One of the day's small joys was, as is often the case for me, and Excel spreadsheet. Yes, I have a small, sad, slightly odd life. But this was an important spreadsheet, for it brought a little moment of hope into an otherwise fairly 'meh' day. This was the little spreadsheet that contains a record of all of my Janathon and Juneathon runs, from 2011 and 2012. And this little spreadsheet also simplifies all of the big numbers and silly pace calculations and shows me a little graph of how far I ran in Janathon and Juneathon 2011 and how far I've run in Janathon 2012. "Simples", as a furry rodent of the genus Suricata suricatta might put it.

The small joyous hopeful thing this simple spreadsheet showed me was that, despite not having run over the weekend, I was still ahead of my Janathon 2011 cumulative mileage. That might not seem like a world-changing idea, given how much I've done since Jan 1st 2011, but it made me a little happier, and it made stepping out of the back door in my running shoes a little easier. So the MP3 player went on, and I trotted off for a short run...

... Which became a little bit of a longer run...

...Which got even longer...

...And when I finally came home it turned out to be an 11-and-a-bit-km run. Which was far better than I'd hoped for.

So, perhaps sometimes the best runs do come at the end of the worst days. Sometimes you have to have the 'meh' to fuel the furnace with. Sometimes a bit of The Avalanches 'Frontier Psychiatrist' is the tune you want to be stepping out of the door to. And sometimes, the flat hard bit in the middle is still flat, but isn't quite as hard as you imagine it. Here's to more of those times...

Comments

abradypus said…
I may be able to out-sad you. I found myself reverse engineering the formula that fetch everyone uses to predict your marathon time from your 5k time... and then set up a lovely excel chart to illustrate it ;)
Ooh, nice work! I figure all this exercise at least licenses me to be a leetle bit geeky in my 'normal life'. Considering I seem to spend my non-working hours ragging around the city in lycra... :)
Anonymous said…
I LOVE spreadsheets too - so much so that my workmates bougt me a mug to prove it!

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