A Chef's Steel

I found myself in the midst of another "normal" running schedule this week - hills on Monday, an easy run on Wednesday, speed work on Thursday, and a long run on Saturday - and today was the appointed time for speed work.  I do believe in "appointed times," in schedules, as long as they are flexible enough to account for the unexpected.  I have found that the old saying, "Plan your run and run your plan" has always worked for me, and I notice that most of the serious runners in our group like Morris and Jim and Skip (when he has not been injured) all stick pretty much to a plan, often a combination of the tried and true and some interesting new workout.  (Morris is the champion of innovative training plans; you can see his little white paint marks on pavement all over town, marking new combinations of distance and speed and grade.)  Most of us who have been running for any length of time, after all, want to either get faster or run longer (or, as we age, to slow down the inevitable decline in both speed and distance). 

So after running nearly three easy miles, I attacked that short hill at the end of Sixth Street again in a series of ten fast uphill sprints as I have for some four weeks in a row now.  It is exhilarating to run fast, to see if you can hit the desired time goal exactly on target in the next item (or in this case to simply run fast and hard and not let up at all).  And it is satisfying to complete a series of intervals knowing you have given your best.  I often think that I am honing myself on the hard stone of discipline, making myself sharper and sharper with each stroke. 

I recently took my Chef's knife to Reeves Hardware to have it sharpened on their expensive knife sharpener (a bargain at $2.99 per knife).  This time, I learned how to keep it sharp by using a Chef's Steel, or a honing steel, like this one.  It's a piece of steel with longitudinal ridges that I never really learned how to use properly until I watched some videos on You Tube, and now I use it every time I use my knife.  (A sharp knife is a thing of beauty!)  I learned that a Chef's Steel does not actually sharpen a knife, if realigns an already-sharp blade.

"The naming ("honing" or "sharpening") is often a misnomer, because the traditional "honing steel" neither hones nor sharpens a blade. Instead, its function is to realign a curled edge rather than remove metal from the edge." -  Wikipedia

Now when I complete workouts on my speed days, I think of myself not as honing my fitness, but as keeping a sharp edge by re-aligning everything.  I am not taking away any material; I am simply keeping everything straight, removing all of the kinks in the never-ending process of learning how to improve.