Rest

The Fells... in photos...

Pretty much how I felt all day....

I think this is more of a grimace than a smile... lap #4

This is my favorite. At least here I looked focused ;)

(All Photos by Zachariah Minnick)

Sunday, I felt pretty terrible. My legs were sore and I was exhausted. I hacked all day long (and Saturday evening too). This week, things have slowly turned around. My legs felt better by Tuesday and my cold is now, finally, almost entirely gone. Not sure 9 1/2 hours out in the cold helped but at least it didn't seem to make it worse, perhaps just prolonged things... My plan was to take this week off entirely anyway, so no harm done. So this week has called for rest and healing, and eat all the things ;) You know the drill. I'll try to make it through part of next week without any running too, but we'll see how that goes. I'm already starting to get antsy :)

I wonder sometimes why I do these things, go out and run for hours on end when it doesn't always feel good, when I don't always feel good. I still have not quite found a way to express why ultras call to me, to try these seemingly crazy things and see what happens.

Today I read a post from the Chronicles of an Endurance Athlete's Wife that contained the following:

'A friend recently sent my husband a quote by David Blaikie about ultrarunning and it got me thinking about this whole shebang.

“Perhaps the genius of ultrarunning is its supreme lack of utility. It makes no sense in a world of spaceships and supercomputers to run vast distances on foot. There is no money in it and no fame, frequently not even the approval of peers. But as poets, apostles and philosophers have insisted from the dawn of time, there is more to life than logic and common sense.

The ultra runners know this instinctively. And they know something else that is lost on the sedentary.
They understand, perhaps better than anyone, that the doors to the spirit will swing open with physical effort.

In running such long and taxing distances they answer a call from the deepest realms of their being – a call that asks who they are …”'

These are someone else's words, yes, but they help me, little by little, to understand why finishing that 40, painful as it was, is important, why another 100 is on my list, why there is joy in pain and satisfaction in grinding it out. There is indeed more to life than logic and common sense. Sometimes it is what flies in the face of those both that is the most rewarding, the most interesting. I may be a logical gal who truly is most rooted in reality and common sense, but that is oh so boring ;) Sometimes you have to step outside, to see what you're made of...