I am seeing some pushback on Twitter and Facebook about those of us who are continuing to Tweet or post elsewhere and we are not talking about Presidential Tweeting, murder in the streets, riots, racism, politics, pandemic response, economic disaster, police (for and against)e, facemasks and all the other crises of the present hour.

I am not burying my head in the sand about what is going on in our Country over the last six months or even the last 24 hours. I made a purposeful decision when I created this blog to not talk about my personal or political beliefs and attempt to focus primarily on running.

I plan to keep it that way.

No, I am not being naive, callous or ignoring the world around me, I am VERY aware of what is going on, where I stand and what I am doing. I am instead controlling the things that I can control and one of them is what I write about on this blog.

Back to my running.

The Good?

Today I ran and worked on running form quite a bit. I finished reading the Pose Method book last night and while I am not going to go all in with the Pose Method or any other you gotta run this way book. There were some ideas that seemed to be good practice and I attempted to play with them during the first part of the run.

I did the planned run and ran comfortably just about the entire run.

After the run, I did go back to my bookcase and picked out “Your Best Stride” by Jonathan Beverly and have started to re-read it again. I may not ever really change my running mechanics or stride, but I do believe that right now is a good time to work on making the old body a bit more efficient and resilient. Hence I have been re-reading a lot of books on improving my wonderfully inefficient stride – again.

What did I learn?

Trying thing a bit differently in your running form is work. You have to focus on the things you are trying that are different than what you normally do, thinking about external stuff and when you add that into running on a rocky dirt road, well you can only do that kind of new stuff for so long before you have to get back to just running again.

The Run

Planned – I plan to go out and do an easy 4.0 miles to the Town Office and work on running form mechanics.

• 1.0 – 8:49 / I wasn’t trying for speed, I was working on cleaning up the mechanics and avoiding stepping on rocks.
• 2.0 – 8:48 / More of the same, but actually I was pretty consistent
• 3.0 – 9:05 / Coming back against the breeze and Blake Hill didn’t help, plus I kept loosing focus and thinking about all the crapola going on in the world, even though there is not a whole lot that I can do about it.
• 4.0 – 9:30 / I just went back to Harold running until I went by SD2’s house and then I started working on running form again. I wanted to see if I could do it when the legs were a little more tired. I was able to do it, but I had to focus more and that led to me feeling more tired than the body actually was.

What was I thinking?

I thought about how hard it is maintain a running form that is different from my normal Harold running. I figured out that I would not be doing the Pose Running Program at about mile 3.0. Not so much because I do not want to do it, but more because I am running pretty well right now and these times where I get to run fairly well and injury-free are precious to me. There are some things that I will incorporate into my running, but it will not be the drop everything and start over that would be the best way to learn the Pose Method.

All the shit going on in America – yeah it bothers me and I tend to think too much about everything.

Why the neighbor who saw Bennie and I walking up from down-back let his dog run loose without her electronic collar on in their yard when he was driving in, when he knows that she will come out to attack Bennie. It almost caused a really bad scene and if another neighbor hadn’t been riding in their golf cart and put it between the other dog and Bennie – it could have been a real shitshow.

I was still seething over that and wanted to stop and have a little chat about things, but I was still pissed and it would have only caused more problems than it would have solved. The run helped me deal with that frustration too.

So it was hard to focus on the running form stuff with all the other crap going on in my mind.

• Course: Town Office 4.0 Miler
• Weather: Mostly Sunny, 57*F, 38% Humidity, 13mph breeze from NW
• Distance: 4.07
• Time: 36:48
• Pace: 9:03

Shoes: New Balance Beacon v1 (Orange) – Did everything I wanted and did not bother my feet.

Progress: I did run with more of a lean and purposely avoiding over-striding and my usual heel first landing stride. The legs felt pretty good throughout the run and while I had issues with focusing due to external factors I still felt that I did okay with attempting to run a bit more efficiently.

Someday I will run efficiently up Stevens Hill and not have a super slow split as a result of it. 🙂