Thoughts While Jogging: Arbitrary Limits

I went out for another 5 kilometer jog on Saturday. It’s been over three months since the last time I tried it, if you can believe it. This time, I wanted to go slower–not push myself as hard. I’d proven to myself that I could jog for 5 kilometers without stopping, now I want to work to get to the point where I can jog that much without wishing I were dead at the finish line.

It’s good to have goals, right?

In any case, I started jogging and went for the first kilometer at what felt like a decent pace. Then I walked for a bit and started jogging again a little while later. TRC was out with me, riding his bike in circles around me as I tried to keep a steady pace. That’s when I made observation number one:

Once I choose to walk once, it becomes much, much easier to choose to walk the second time. And the third. And so on. When I was jogging before, I never stopped, and because I never stopped, it was easier to keep going. I know this isn’t rocket science, but it was amazing to me how hard it felt to start jogging again after I’d been walking for a while. In fact, by the end, I pretty much was walking the whole time. I would do a few sprints, just to try and keep my time to something less-than-completely-pathetic, but mostly, it was walk walk walk.

TRC’s bike chain kept falling off the gears, so I had to stop a few times and fix that, which was frustrating to me. Observation number two: when I have an exterior “thing” to put blame on, it becomes very easy to attribute all the problems I’m having to that thing. “I could be jogging more, if that darned chain hadn’t fallen off twice. Since I had to stop to fix it, I lost all my momentum. That’s why I’m going so slowly.”

I’m afraid I wasn’t a very good biking partner to TRC. I kept snapping at him to keep his chain on his bike. Which is observation number three: Bryce isn’t a very nice Bryce when he’s in the middle of jogging. Go figure.

But when I got back to the house and stopped my running tracker app on my iPhone, I came across an unexpected observation number four: even with all of the walking I’d done (pausing the app when I had to physically stop to fix the chain, of course), I was still only about 40 seconds slower than the last time I jogged 5 kilometers, three months ago.

That turtle-like pace I thought I was making the whole time? Most of that was just in my head. I was jogging faster when I was jogging, and walking let me recover some so I didn’t feel flat out terrible when I was finished.

Which all leads me to observation number five: Bryce makes way too many observations out of every day life occurrences.

In any case, it was a pleasant weekend. I went to Bangor for the fourth time, and I believe I don’t have to go back until the end of October. I finished the second draft of OUR LADY, I played some Magic with TRC, cleaned up the house some, and finished stacking the wood.

But I won’t tell you about any of the observations I made during all of that.

Welcome back to the work week, folks. Catch ya tomorrow!

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