February 11th: Finally Back in Action, and Some Thoughts About Inspiration

I guess there’s simply nothing I can do about it: I lost a whole week of training to that stupid upper-respiratory illness. And I’m still not 100 percent better -- the cough is lingering, and my runny nose hasn’t stopped entirely. But if I wait until everything is perfect, it’ll be weeks, and I can kiss the marathon goodbye.

Nonetheless, I thought it prudent to ease back into my routine, get my body -- particularly my lungs -- reacquainted with the idea of working. So I settled on a normal distance for a Tuesday -- 4 miles -- at a nice easy treadmill pace of 9:40s. It was good to get back moving again, and I never felt like I was getting anywhere near overdoing it -- though I’d bet that my VO2 max isn’t quite where it would be if I were totally healthy. I’ll add that when I was done, I did feel as though I’d loosened up some of the residual congestion, which I hope will help me clear it out more quickly.

I stuck to my pace the whole way through, speeding up just enough for a couple of minutes to make up the lag at the beginning as the belt gets up to speed. 4 miles, 38:38 -- just about exactly 9:40s.

At the beginning of the year, I posted a long entry with some advice for newbies at the gym, based on my

Remember my empty-gym pic?

experiences -- both successes and failures. And I’ve said a bunch of times that one of my main reasons for keeping this blog going is that I hope I can help someone or inspire someone, in the way that many other people have helped and inspired me. But sometimes I wonder if I’m really doing that.

I initiated a conversation with Jackie the other night in which I noted that, despite my best intentions, the advice that I’ve been trying to give her on her fitness journey has come off as judgmental. And of course, that really bothers me, because I feel that I have a lot to offer people. I’m not an expert runner or trainer or weightlifter or anything. But I have had success, and I have a good sense of the things that have worked for me and the things that haven’t. I’ve also learned a lot, through research and simply listening (and seeking) the advice of my friends.

So the last thing I want is to turn people off to improving themselves. I’ve said it plenty of times: If I can do it, anybody can. But if I can’t engender the trust of the person closest to me, it really makes me wonder about my approach. Am I too in-your-face? Do I talk about it too much? Do you get the sense I’m trying to make myself look good and not really trying to help?

I’ve tried to keep the focus of this blog on my thoughts, my experiences, my feelings. Fitness is a personal journey, and the idea is to document my journey in the hope that it will help other people relate to theirs. Jackie and I agreed that if she’s looking for my help, she’ll ask me; otherwise, she’ll do her own thing. But I do plan to continue writing. So I hope that you get something out of my experiences, and I ask most humbly that you understand that any advice I offer comes from the best of intentions.

Tomorrow is my kinda long -- I’m hoping to get 7 miles in, but we’ll just have to see how my lungs feel. (Maybe I'll add an extra tenth -- that .9 in my total is bothering me.) Thursday could be snowed out, which I think would force me to scramble the rest of the week. And I don’t think there will be anywhere outdoors to run, even if the temperatures cooperate over the weekend, so it looks like my long will be on the belt.

Miles since starting the blog: 309.9