Cadence, breath, rest

For the last four years, the rhythm of my life has been defined by running. I have come to think in terms of breath and cadence. I have completed two ultramarathons, three marathons, and more. I have found my distance (the half), and come through injury multiple times to run even better than before.

I am moving on from being a beginner as I enter my fifth year of serious running. It's time to quit making rookie mistakes (I tell myself), it's time to take rest & recovery seriously. This also has to do with my age. But Sheehan has put to rest the idea that age need be any significant barrier to achievement. 

My age requires to find that achievement, and rests, like silences in music, come to structure it. We become better in recovery when we incorporate it into our training regime. This occurs over multiple temporal scales and rhythms. At the levels of days (we stop running or we double run); weeks (we have rest days); and seasons (we, like Jurek, take a couple of months to do something else).

My right, and then my left, shin became sore to the point of prohibiting further running for at least a week. I went into self-rehab, and it worked, as it has before. I took it easy and made a comeback. If I've done it before, I can do it again. I've proven that. Now I need to prove that my running can withstand a significant rest.

Rest need not obviate the act of writing and reflection. One will still generate diary entries from the act of letting one's body lie fallow for a time, or at least of letting the muscles that have come to so dominate re-balance and settle into a different kind of harmony with the rest. I'll do chin ups, pushups, situps, leg-lifts and toe-crunches and then I'll fold the gains back into the field of myself.

Schoenberg and Bartok have ruled an atonal summer, a chaotic collage of plague and epic fail. The collage of myself has been similarly crimped, crying, and bombastic. What I need is a new kind of music more conducive to the rest and the recovery. Perhaps more Dvorak, more Bach, more Takamitsu. I'll listen to classical guitar, to Tarrega, whose lines run clean like those in fields formerly fallow.

The plan is, come November, to begin to work from whatever base I still have towards the Brighton marathon, with the Wokingham Half as a test run. This is what I did last year. If it worked once it can work again, but I need clean base, a clear slate, from which to spring into that endeavour.