Week 4: Run 1

Scheduled: 3
Actual: 3
RPE: 4

I really pushed hard on this run. After hurting my quad stretching (of all things) the day before, I was hurting a bit. But it seemed like the faster I ran, the less it hurt, so I just pushed really hard the first mile and a half. I was dragging ass the next quarter of a mile, my quad was killing every step. So I decided to try this technique I read about in some cancer novel. (Actually, I have no idea where I read about it, but I must have read about it somewhere, because I don't think I would make this kind of shit up.)

The technique is kind of a pain management/out of body type thing. What you do is focus on something external, like say a tree on the horizon, and put all of your pain into that tree. For some reason (and I know it sounds hokey and new agey) all the concentration on mentally giving your pain a physical space to reside in that isn't your body, makes you forget about or lose your pain. The weirdest part is, one would think that my quad would start to hurt again once I stopped doing this technique (which I guess I need to give a name for) but today, my quad doesn't hurt at all. I did stretch immediately after my run, so that I'm sure is playing a large part in this, but I swear that it works. I did this once before when I had really bad cramps and no Advil. I imagined the pain as tiny threads that I could pull out and throw away. So I would mentally go into the pain and find a thread, pull it out and work on the next one, until eventually the pain was gone. Like I said, I don't believe in this shit normally, and if it didn't work for me, I wouldn't be talking about it. But it totally works and I'm a big fan.