I had so much trouble figuring out a post for today. I looked through all of my remaining calendar pages and nothing jumped out at me to write about. I've had a long, hard weekend and a crappy long run today, and I don't feel anything akin to inspired.
I kept coming back to this page about endurance and, frankly, it was kind of ticking me off. My long run today was the opposite of what endurance is. I didn't have the power to withstand the pain or hardship of the run. I couldn't find the ability or strength to continue despite fatigue, stress or adverse conditions. And it's not the first time. I've been aware that I have gotten out of the practice of hurting in workouts like this. I'm even doing my quality run workouts with my coach now, and that's helping. It's helping when I'm with him. And then here I am out on my own caving in right and left. I don't feel like a runner in these moments. I certainly don't feel like an endurance athlete, particularly when you see the definition of endurance.
But I started to think about my life, and the term endurance absolutely applies to me there. Then I realized that I talk about how much I learn about my life from running, but I haven't really talked a lot about what I can learn about running from my life. Could I lean on my life experiences and apply those to running? It's a new thought so I don't know how this works yet, but it seems I might have gained a little life wisdom that I could tap in to. Maybe I don't have to come up with something new to figure out how to become successful on my long runs. Maybe all I have to do is dig a little deeper inside of me to the reserves I've already built in endurance.
I have a life endurance muscle, and I'm certainly building a writing endurance muscle. (I'm doing that right this minute, at 11:20pm, after a loooong day--doggedly determined to keep my word to myself about these posts). And I believe I can take lessons from each of those, and I can build my long run endurance muscle too.