Week 12: Putting it all Together!

Lots of things have been covered here over the past semester, and it's always such a cool thing to watch all of your hard work come together by the end of the season! There's no better feeling than knowing you accomplished all you set out to do during a hard running season. Knowing that feeling of fulfillment is amazing because you know that if you can survive a challenging season of exerting everything you have almost four times a week, you can probably do anything. Running is good for you, and when incorporated into an overall balanced lifestyle it really can go a long way toward making you healthy, confident, inspired, and motivated. Running is about pushing yourself. Yes, you can build yourself up to a certain fitness level and be comfortable maintaining it, but that’s not really the point. I think it’s exciting to see how far you can push your own body, seeing how far you can go. Breaking records is what I'm all about. It makes me feel almost superhuman. Inserting speedwork and occasional races into your running routine is all part of the fun too! I think of them as just another challenge, a metaphorical hurdle if you will. I started this blog to share my passions with others who also love running or those who are just curious as to what I do. I wanted to challenge myself to make the ideas that I'd been thinking of about running relevant to my own life and to be able to share them with others as well. All runners deal with philosophy, whether it be training philosophy, racing philosophy, or the more basic questions like how does running fit with my own philosophy? And what does the fact that I run say about my philosophy of living? We've all got answers to these questions, though they rarely are discussed because it's so personal and specific to each person. Personally, one of the reasons I love to run is that it gets ideas firing. Running and philosophy are a natural fit. One of the greatest things about being a runner is that the activity creates this sort of unique space of intellectual freedom. As my body moves, so does my mind. So I run. My life has kind of sucked lately, and there's been no better way to hash things out and compartmentalize my thoughts better than through running.