Feast or Famine... and the Flow Between
I tried out the Yeti 24 hour challenge last week – run five miles every four hours for 24 hours for a total of 30 hours throughout the day. For an added challenge I opted to do all of my miles on a cheap little treadmill I have that’s been collecting dust in the garage.
The challenge was tougher than I imagined, and in ways I didn’t expect – always happens that way, right? I thought I would sleep between runs during the night, but then be able to get some actual work done in the “off” hours during the day – wrong. I also thought a steady 12 min mile, even on the treadmill, was a very low bar – also wrong, but we’ll get to that later.
The first challenge I recognized was the ability to get to sleep after my post run routine – cool off, post update to social media, shower, drink a glass of red wine (yes even at 8am) and try and to read a bit. I’ve always been a good sleeper, a natural ability honed to perfection by years in the Marine Corps, but I struggled to drift off no matter the late hour or how exhausted I was. The transition between the extremes was two sudden and jarring.
In fitness and life, I’ve been comfortable on the extremes. During a semester abroad in Italy my roommate once told me my approach to finances were “feast or famine.” One weekend I’d be buying the expensive red to go with a cheap Tuesday dinner, while the next I’m calling my mom with my last euro begging for $20 so I didn’t have to sleep on some Spanish beach. This is not the sound financial behavior I now preach, but (quite literally), when in Rome.
It’s been like this with my fitness for the past few years as well, and my strava account can verify. I ran ~4 miles in December and ~400 in January. There’s little consistency from month to month, and I’m mostly ok with that, because there’s balance over the years. I call it macro balance, and I tried to remember it when it comes to areas outside running. For the most part, our running experiences can’t be reflected in a single day or week. Likewise, we aren’t the sum of our actions and experiences in a day, or a week or even a year. But the choices we’ve made and experiences we’ve had over a lifetime. I have plenty to be proud of in my life, and plenty to regret, plenty of bad decisions with no silver linings – and they don’t cancel themselves out. My good behavior doesn’t make up for my bad behavior any more than my fitness two years ago cancels out my lack of it this year, it’s not a ledger. They just both exist, and I flow between them.
Because the runs I love to do lately take chunks of days/weeks or even months to accomplish, I’m ok with leaving it off the calendar for a month and letting something else take focus. I’m ok flowing between the poles of ultra running and ultra working (or ultra lounging).
Which was the second hurdle on this 24 hour challenge – posting my run times. They were embarrassing slow, even for treadmill times. I had to take way more walk breaks than expected and struggled to maintain even a 10 min pace. I really beat myself up there for a minute, blaming the treadmill, “I think it’s broken,” blaming the lack of sleep, blaming dehydration “Can you please bring me some water!” and ultimately blaming myself. Of course the dozens of Instagram memes of demanding us all to suck it up and work harder began to flash in my mind, jumbled up with those urging me to allow grace to myself in these times of uncertainty, giving me approval and borderline applause for doing nothing all day. So now what do I think? Am I using COVID as a useful excuse to neglect my health and fitness? Or am I beating myself up for reacting normally to a nationwide crisis? Most importantly should I post my times???
But being comfortable in the flow between means acknowledging where you are in that flow. Only then can we offer ourselves grace. Still, grace is not a free pass, and allowing yourself some means you have to first name what it is you need grace for. In this case, I’m giving myself a little grace for veering too far to the “unfit” side of the spectrum. I’ve been literally feasting while my body and mind have been starved for physical exercise. So I posted my times. I’m not proud of them, but I know they don’t wholly define me, and that those capabilities are fleeting – dependent on what I do or don’t do next, but they were mine and they were what I could do to honor fallen servicewomen. Besides, you must know where you’re at in order to know where to flow.