Smart? ... Perhaps. Not Dumb? ... Definitely.

I am a person who likes to set schedules for myself. Short-term, long-term, and all terms in between. This is especially true for running, especially since I’ve made the move from jogging to training. That was the beauty of the marathon training plan – weeks and weeks of schedules and targets. Piles and piles of data to load into Excel and analyze into pivot-table/graph/report bliss. Interim goals to gauge progress. Every long training run over 12 miles became my new ‘longest run I’ve ever done’. The monkey in my brain in charge of schedules was in Skinner-box heaven.


Then I done got broked.

Yesterday was a significant day not in terms of what I did, but rather what I didn’t do. I had set a timetable with my Plantar Fasciitis recovery such that Sunday was going to be my first attempt at running after having shut everything down for 2.5 weeks. After I got up and went through my stretching and massage on my foot and took my first few tentative steps of the day, I realized that my foot just wasn’t quite ready. Rather than going for a run anyhow, which is how I usually work based on the schedule I had set, I decided that I needed at least another week before I tried to run. Amazingly, my mind and body struck an agreement, and no run was attempted. No happy reunion with my Garmin, no sweating like sasquatch in the lovely 97-degree Raleigh weather, no listening to any new iTunes downloads. Did it make me happy? No. Do I feel good about the decision today? Yes.

I did end up going for a couple-mile walk at a decent pace, which didn’t feel too bad. I replaced my insoles last week with Smartfeet insoles, and the added, more rigid arch support seems to help. Spent a fair amount of time on my feet doing yard work, and didn’t deal with much in the way of pain. Next Sunday I’ll reassess, and maybe that will be the lucky day when I can run again. Or maybe not. I will once again let my body tell me what to do, rather than my arbitrary schedules.

In non-running news, my family took me to see Toy Story 3 in IMAX 3D Saturday night as an early Father’s Day gift, and it was GREAT. I love the first 2 movies, and really most everything Pixar has done with the exception of Cars, which I didn’t dislike, it just didn’t do much for me. Anyhow, Toy Story 3 was once of the best movies I’ve seen in a long, long time. Very cool mix of people that were at the showing too, including college kids that would have been very young when the first one came out, and grew up with these movies and these characters. I can’t recommend this movie enough. What a great way to spend an evening with my family.