Listening to my Body

Today, only two weeks into the Plan, I failed to complete a scheduled six-mile run.  The reason?  I mixed these 18 bags of concrete mix by hand in my old wheelbarrow, the slab for our new garden shed - or "folly," if you will! - and by the time 4:00 p.m. rolled around I was just exhausted.  Martha turned at the two-mile mark and ran four, and urged me to go on in at that point and call it a day.  And I succumbed.

"Listen to your body."  That's the advice often given by coaches, but it is not always easy to distinguish between the discomfort that comes from pushing boundaries and the serious outcry - the red zone of fatigue.  Sometimes, it is good to go there, but not today.  Much of the time, our bodies are saying, "Hey, slow down!  Come on, let's call it a day!  It's too hot out here!"  But that's just the usual complaining that we learn to suppress.  If we wait for a mile or so, we usually leave those little voices behind and begin to fall into the rhythm of the run.  It's that deep fatigue, or that little niggling tightness that might very well turn into an injury, that we are really listening for, and today it spoke loud and clear. 

"You idiot," my legs said.  "You spent three hours this afternoon mixing up concrete by hand!  You can barely lift your arms (and by the way, fat lot of good it has done to go to the gym twice a week!).  Give it a rest."

So I did.  2.36 miles and proud of it.