Time for You to Get a Watch

Today I got a bug to revisit a trail I haven’t run in over a decade. I’ve hiked sections of it, but as for running itself, it’s been ages. There was a time where I ran it nearly every week, so it felt significant to return to it with the intention to run. Especially because this trail is hilly. I remember liking it for that reason. The hills roll and there are some serious climbs, but they’re always followed by a recovery downhill. It’s a bit like doing hill repeats, but without having to run the same sections over and over. That makes it a really nice place to train if you have a baseline fitness, but it's miserable if you don’t.

And I haven’t.

Which is why I haven’t bothered even trying to run it until today.

Honestly, I’m surprised that I wanted to. I guess the time away sort of flattened the trail out in my mind, and by the time I re-encountered those hills and remembered their enormity (second photo down, though it really doesn’t do the hill justice), I was already delusionally attached to seeing what I could do.

It was hard. But I felt so strong! I had only planned to go two miles, but I was feeling so good that I blew past the turnaround time on accident (or was it?) and ended up going four. I ran every one of those hills. I ran them slowly, but I ran them. The only exception was walking half of one downhill after a killer climb—my quads were too wobbly for me to trust them at higher speeds on a decent.

It was hard, yes, but I did it.

I did it!

I’m so proud of myself! If I could run that trail at any speed, I am so much stronger than I thought I was. I am so capable. I am so strong. This was a beautiful, empowering, emboldening run.

—

My one frustration is that the Strava app glitched and froze my tracking on the way back. In the rare instances that I’ve run at all in the last decade, I have desperately avoided tracking mileage and times. They were too quantifiable, too easy to compare myself to a version of myself whose life revolved around running. It was enough to make me quit before I even began. The fact that I’m counting miles and looking at my pace at all speaks volumes to how far I’ve come.

Lately I’ve been curious about a new metric: elevation gain. It’s not one we tracked on my high school cross country team, which is where most of my running knowledge stems from. I don’t have a great grasp on reading the numbers to understand the intensity of the climb, and I was excited to use this run to give me a better sense of what elevation gain means over a distance, how that impacts my pace, and to take all that into consideration with how I physically felt during the run.

I guess it’s a good sign to be bummed out over losing data from a run. It feels nice to be able to engage without a complete spiraling shutdown.

I think it's probably time to get a watch.