My legs feel as heavy as the stack of textbooks my daughter lugged home on her first day of 7th grade last week, and when it comes time to run, I want nothing more than to curl up with my novel and eat an entire bag of peanut-butter-filled pretzels.

September and the start of school should mark an end to the Dog Days of Summer — the months plagued by heat and a lack of productivity, or a period generally marked by stagnation and lethargy — but I have felt mired in the dog days of training. (I always thought they were called “dog days” because dogs lie around with tongues out panting, but in fact the name comes from the position of Sirius in the night sky during summer; Sirius, the brightest star, is known as “the dog star” because of its position in the Canis Major constellation. But I digress …)

I don’t know why I’m feeling sluggish and negative; I can’t blame the weather, which mostly has been mild, or my schedule, which has been manageable. If someone asks me how I’m running, I say “slowly” or “not enough.” I feel thick and heavy and nightly give into cravings for beer and cheese. My head buzzes with negative self-chatter about how I’m slacking off and not putting in the effort to do my best at the upcoming race.

And then, all of a sudden, a couple of things slapped me on the side of the head and knocked me out of the running doldrums.

First, I took the time to thumb through the last six months of my training log. (Funny how I keep a training log but rarely use it for its most useful purpose: to review progress over weeks and months in order to see patterns in training, to better understand highs and lows, and to set goals for the coming months. I tend to jot down each day’s workout and then forget about it.) The training log served its purpose: It gave me an objective record of my recent performance that showed my self-assessment was seriously out of whack.

I have, in fact, been running at a level that I would have celebrated just three months ago, when I was embarking on this training cycle and struggling to surpass 40 miles a week. I’m running roughly 50 percent more than I used to, including a marathon-length training run most weekends and a speed workout midweek. I’m staying injury free and making steady progress. I’m running strong on long runs; it’s just hard to get out the door and enjoy running during the week.

Secondly, I stumbled upon an article about overtraining, and its descriptions of the symptoms — general fatigue and lingering muscle soreness, irritability, disrupted sleep, feeling drained even after a good night’s sleep, feeling like running is a chore — sounded familiar. Maybe I’m on the verge of overtraining and not giving myself adequate time to recover from hard effort.

Finally, I acknowledged I’m stressed about a variety of things on the personal front. My daughter has a knee injury that requires a complicated surgery this coming week, and I’ve been feeling incredibly sorry for her and protective of her. She twice dislocated her kneecap, in the process tearing a ligament that holds it in place (the medial patellofemoral) and damaging the cartilage. Surgery will fix the cartilage and take a piece of her hamstring tendon to reconstruct the ligament, which is not too hard to do on an adult, but quite tricky on a 12-year-old who’s still growing. I’m trying to be optimistic yet suppressing a fear that my radiant, energetic daughter, who unfortunately is anatomically prone to knee dislocations, will be hindered by a bum knee. Beyond that, our household is dealing with the transition of Morgan and me both trying to work from home and the kids both getting used to school after the past year’s hiatus. Some days it really feels as though reality bites.

That all helped me realize how foolish I have been to make running a source of stress — by worrying about my training level and measuring myself against ultrarunning friends who put in more miles — rather than a solace. Now I’m trying to remind myself: look how far I’ve come, and how fortunate I am to run for hours on these healthy knees. Cutting myself a little slack doesn’t make me a slacker.

My running friends Christine Chapon and Jim Hesson helped me do a marathon-length long run looping twice around Briones Reservoir. Without them, I might have blown off that second loop!

Here’s a recap of the past three weeks (if you’re wondering what this is about, check out the Week 1 post):

Week 11:

Mileage: After the previous peak week of 83 miles in Yosemite, I scaled back to 48.5 for an extra recovery day.

# of days and time spent running: 5 days, 8 hours

Longest run: 23 around Redwood and Chabot

Speed Workout? Yes, to track for 2 miles at approx 6:30 pace, then 2 x 1200

Cross Training? Yes, upper body strength training and balance twice

Week 12:

Mileage: 63

# of days and time spent running: 7 days, 10 hours

Longest run: 27 — double loop around Briones Reservoir

Speed Workout? Yes, to track for 2 mile, 1 mile, 1 mile + stair repeats. Fastest mile 6:10

Cross Training? Yes, upper body/core/phys therapy exercises four times this week

Week 13:

Mileage: 60.5

# of days and time spent running: 6 days; 9 hrs, 40 min

Longest run: 26, loop around Chabot and into Redwood

Speed Workout? Sort of — tempo lap around Lake Merritt as part of longer run

Cross Training? A couple of gym workouts with focus on balance, stretching and core

What I did to prevent injury during the last three weeks: Tried to alternate easy/hard days and took an extra day of recovery after the Yosemite trip.

Tags: Briones Reservoir trail, dick collins firetrails 50, marathoning, overtraining, parenting, Running, trail running, Ultrarunning

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 5th, 2010 at 8:47 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.