I headed out a little after 7:30 AM.  While I was running, something someone said to me on Twitter kept rolling around in my head.  He mentioned that it’s good to do a long run once a week, when you don’t focus on distance and go purely for time.  This gets the body used to running for longer amounts of time.  I’m not actively training for a race and have never used an on-line training program or even a book to get me to the start of a race, so all the theory I’ve learned is absolutely second-hand.

At around mile five I decided to just… keep going.  My pace jumped between 8:40 and 8:15 per mile, certainly not fast based on my past performances, but pretty good all the same.

Two miles later I hit the sixty minute mark.  I was seven miles in and at this pace, if I were doing a half-marathon, I’d be coming in at about 1:51:30, a full nine minutes slower than my half-marathon PR back in December 2009 (the Rock N Roll Las Vegas race).  So, since I wasn’t going for speed, how about running just for the sake of running?  JuliBell writes a blog and commented the other day “it’s called yoga PRACTICE, not yoga PERFECT”.  At this moment in time, my running felt like yoga.  I was practicing the art of running, not the perfection.  What freedom. 

And so it went.  I ran for ninety one minutes and covered eleven miles.  This is the longest I’ve run since my half-marathon race, and my immediate thought was “why did you wait so long?”  Honestly?  I don’t know.

I’m happily tired now.  I’ve put in a good day’s play and I’m mellow and sated.  I thought briefly that I should pick a marathon and start training for it, so I could get in lots MORE long runs.  But then, the happiness that I felt in practicing my run all but disappeared.  Having to work out a training plan, financially commit and then register…  I want to enjoy the art of practice.

Today was all about finishing a ninety minute run.  I wasn’t racing myself, I wasn’t trying to do a 90-minute tempo run at sub-8’s.  Today was about running for ninety minutes and enjoying the time.

When was the last time you let yourself enjoy an activity without pushing yourself harder, faster, stronger?  I don’t mean when you play with the kids, either.  Maybe you’re gentler with yourself than I am with myself.   But on the off-chance that you’re as competitive with yourself as I am with myself, then maybe we all need to reassess, even just a little, to find the joy in the motion.