A Few Adjustments

As much of a tech/gear head as I have been all of my life, sometimes it seems as though when it comes to running, I put the importance of gear ahead of getting out there and simply doing.

You know that always looking for that whatever thing-a-ma-jingy that will give me a little added zip, instead of focusing on the one thing that would do more for my running than any piece of running gear or pair of running shoes.

• Run more consistently and train smahter.

Yeah, it is that simple and it has taken me far too many painful years to realize the truth of what I am writing, now if I could only do it better.

I am not going to make grand sweeping statements or attempt to change who I am overnight – it doesn’t work, but at the same time there are a few things that I can do to think about how and what I am doing.

Without any doubt whatsoever, I am obsessed with my mileage and pace. I want to know how far I have run, how long it took me to get there and how fast I did it, then add in mile splits, heart rate, stride length and cadence – all the time.

Why? Because I now can with the technology available to me.

Which after a few things that have occurred recently that have given me some food for thought and causes me to think that maybe some of this wearable tech is not as great as I once thought it was.

I have been thinking about this question more and more lately, is all this data necessary or even healthy for an aging middle of that pack runner?

After a lot of reflection this weekend, I have come to the conclusion that part of my problem is that I have too many data points, understand just enough to make me dangerous to myself and find myself dwelling too much on the little crap that will really ain’t helping me run all that much better than I have in the past – I just know more about how slow I am getting and when it happens.

I have a sneaking suspicion that if I focus more on the big picture that a lot of the little things will mostly take care of themselves.

So I am going to try a little experiment of one (me) and run with my trusty old Time Ironman watch for a while (again). That’s right running nakid: no GPS, no heart rate, nothing but focusing on the running and how I am feeling while running.

I know how to do this, since for most of my running life, this is how I ran.

The big change for me is that I have revamped my running log to be based primarily on time. I have tried a couple of times in the past to use time as the basis for my running, but always maintained both time and miles, after a while I found myself creeping back into tracking by miles because that is what I have always done.

This should prove interesting and we will see how it works out, I will miss Strava and seeing all the running/fitness activity data that I have available to me there and on Garmin Connect, but at the same time are all that I have been accumulating really necessary to run to run fairly well.

Oh, I will keep writing about my runs on my blog, but it will focus on how I feel, what I see and how often Bennie acts like a bonehead or motivates me to run a lot faster than I should – not numbers to crunch, munch and drool on.

Running Shoes

The second part is that — Yes, I know that I have a very healthy fascination or is that obsession with running shoes. It probably won’t go away completely – I know that much about me. However, a lot of the drooling and gotta have that new shoe will be taken care naturally.

So I foresee that my running shoe obsession will moderate – quite simply there just ain’t that many brands, models or makes of EE width running shoes and many of them are not the ones that I tend to drool over like Pavlov’s dogs…

Who knows, I might even wear a few pair out, now that they don’t hurt my damn feet. 🙂

Honestly

These changes are not earth shattering and won’t cause the little blue ball to suddenly stop spinning. Honestly, I have done/tried this stuff before with reducing technology in my running and the allure of the next shiny tech running gear or that new pair of shoes is an awfully strong siren’s song.

However, at some point, it comes down to what do I really need to run decently, not be overly obsessive about how I am doing and accepting that as I get older I will change how I run – that getting slower and having more aches/pains thing.

Someday I will finally find the right balance for me and what I want to accomplish as a runner.