Last night I went out for a run with my running club. I nearly didn’t go – about 15 minutes before I was due to leave the heavens opened (again) and it became clear that the evening was going to be a wet one. But I told myself that I couldn’t keep not going to the running club every time a bit of water fell out of the sky. It was still raining by the time we got out for the run about 45 minutes later but the amount of water on the ground seemed out of all proportion to the time the rain had been falling. Much of the run was spent splashing through almost ankle deep puddles and/or trying to avoid them. The end result was that I found myself retreating into my own little space and musing about the difficulties I have been having trying to decide on my running plans for the year ahead.
Usually at this time of the year I have a pretty good idea of the focus for my running in the first part of the year. For example, last year I had set myself the target of a 50 mile ultramarathon in May and the year before I had set up a succession of races of steadily increasing distance ahead of the 32 mile Dartmoor Discovery event in June. This year I have been vacillating badly. I haven’t yet entered a major event and I haven’t been able to decide whether I am going to go proper long again. I had almost decided to start running the entire South West coast path over a period of about 5 years and, with this in mind, I had almost fixed on a set of race events in March, June and August that would cover almost 95 miles of it. But the snag has been that these events are all ones that are popular (so many races seem so much popular than they were even a couple of years ago) and so likely to book up quickly which has meant that I have been trying to make fast decisions on whether to enter them and having to think about associated transport, accommodation etc. And then there was the nasty issue that entering just these three key events was going to cost approximately £150 just for the race entries, a big hit in one go.
Anyway, back to last night’s run. As I ran I found myself wondering whether I really wanted to do any of these events, or rather whether I really wanted the hassle of deciding and committing to any of these events right now. Why couldn’t I just run a bit, enter an event when I felt like it (accepting that certain races would be full), and not feel the pressure of having to decide and plan the year’s running out in advance? And then my mind started to ask the killer questions… by entering and completing race events what was I trying to prove and who was I trying to prove it to? I don’t have an answer to these questions yet. In fact, I am not sure that I want to find answers to them. As I ran it struck me that maybe I should just not be bothered about setting myself a major running target in advance this year. Maybe I should just run, follow a general training plan designed to get me up to marathon plus distance by, say, May, and then, or along the way, see what takes my fancy. Perhaps an event that I thought would book up would have spare spaces after all. Perhaps I’d feel like doing a different event on the spur of the moment. Perhaps a real desire to do a particular race would take hold at some point. I decided none of it really mattered because, I realized, in the final analysis I have no need to prove anything to anyone.
Tim O'Hare 