I’ve got the funk…. or at least I’m in one. I’m in a running funk and I risk falling into a personal funk. This isn’t the first time I’ve fallen into a running funk and it won’t be the last. Now I’ve got to figure out why I’m in it and a way out. The first time I can remember the symptoms of this episode of running funk is right after the Seneca Creek Greenway 50k two weekends ago. I woke up the next morning and desired neither to run the 50k I had plan for the next day nor anything at all. I can think of two major reasons why the funk may have started when it did – overtraining and missing overly optimistic expectations – and both these likely stem from the fact that the previous weeks I ran back to back (B2B) long runs. I’ve never done B2B long runs in the past, but each of these seemed to go well enough, even with two of the Sunday runs being road or flat runs. If you’ve ever experimented with B2Bs, you know that it’s much MUCH easier to go fast/slow than slow/fast. In retrospect I don’t know if I was ready for three such weekends or the general load I ran those weeks. More importantly, my belief that I could do them without a problem made me feel kinda lame when I couldn’t after the way messing/difficult run at Seneca Creek. Looking back, that took the wind out of my sails. When you combine that with bad circumstances early last week, a rest day last Friday, a recovery day on Sunday, I also got out of my rhythm. My frustrating run at Way Too Cool, even if good physical and mental training, has not helped things. Two short, unpleasant runs on Monday and Tuesday were not enough to snap me out of the funk and today I didn’t get home from a work dinner until 9:30 at which point I was too full to run.
Folks, I’m looking for a little spark. Give me a good running story. Give me a smile. I’m not looking for life-making inspiration, so skip the Rudy and man-walks-on-water stories. Just a snippet, picture, quote, etc. that makes me want to go out and run. Sure, I could take two weeks off and that would rid me of my funk, but I don’t want to do that. How do y’all get out of running funks? Got any ideas for a fun run? Something? Anything? :-)
