For one, she does not take well to be ignored. I'm sitting here typing a few hours after my first six mile run in...oh, probably two or three months, and it feels like my entire skeletal structure has been replaced with firecrackers. Tomorrow it won't hurt at all though, and the next time I do a long run (within the week), it'll be a little easier, and the next time it'll be easier still, and so on. This is how you get better at most things, but with running it's easier to quantify that improvement than with, say, writing journal articles or giving presentations: you run farther than you did before, or you run faster than you did before (or both), and that means you're doing better.
The problem with this easy quantifiability is that it works on the impractical assumption that you're always going to keep running, and thus always going to keep getting better, even if progress is slow. For example, I'll often run the same route five times in a row, and sometimes, say, the third run will be slower than the first run. But overall, there's a tendency toward improvement. But if I do three of those runs, and then Other Life gets in the way for a few weeks, and then I come back, I'm lucky if I can even finish that run the fourth time, let alone at the same speed I'd worked up to before.
My run today was 6.5 miles, and I was having a bit of trouble, physically and mentally, by the time I finished. Maybe for some of you reading, that sounds like an amazing achievement. Objectively, I suppose it is. But this past summer I was running 13 miles with fair regularity, at a faster pace throughout that I turned in today on my 6.5 mile run. So to me it feels like stepping backward.
I guess this is what bugs me about running, then: that precisely because it's so easy to quantify your ability level and your progress, it's equally easy to quantify your slips backward. It's maybe a silly thing to worry about: I haven't ran much for the last few months because we moved across the country, settled in to a new city, started new jobs, bought a dog...oh, and I've been hiking about 20-30 miles a week and summiting a peak or two or three every weekend for the last two months. So it's not necessarily that I've gotten lazy (and who cares if I had, anyway?), but more just that I'm not running.
However, knowing that I'm objectively worse at it than I once was, and that the only way to get better is to do the same training I've already done a few times is always a little disheartening. There are a lot of other things in life I can pick back up after a month or so off and at least delude myself into thinking I haven't gotten any worse at them. Like, for example, guitar. I'm certainly better at guitar if I play for an hour every day for a month, but if I play once a week, I can still play one of 30 or so songs well at the drop of hat, and I'm okay with that level of proficiency. Running is always taunting me with the knowledge that I used to be faster, or able to run further. It's hard to be happy about creaking through 6.5 miles when you know you've done an easy 13 miles, and not that long ago. And that's an attitude that I don't naturally have about most things. I'm not obsessive about improvement, perfection, etc. in most aspects of my life, but it feels sometimes like that's the only type of relationship running will allow me to have with it. Nonetheless, I'll be out there doing my 2.6 mile sprint tomorrow, snowy skies willing.
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