This could have been a story about the two guys above and how we develop friendships through this ridiculous (and wonderful) activity.  For real.  Both of these guys I barely knew a decade ago.  Now I count them among my closest training partners.  I assume the feeling is mutual, but they don’t need to say it back.

I have learned a ton from these guys, among many others I have had the privilege of working with over the years.  When I say “learned a lot” it means training methods, but also attitudes towards running and racing.  Like my teaching, I am a different runner now than I was 15 years ago.  Oh, if I only knew then what I know now. . . .

Andrew is training for the Lincoln Marathon.  I don’t want to jinx whatever his goals are, but he has put together a solid training cycle.  One of his recent efforts was a random longish run.  Nothing to indicate that it was going to be a good run.  No workout was planned that day. It was the middle of the week. A big week at that.  But he absolutely ripped it.  When I texted him on it, his only reply was, “It was just one of those runs”.

What a great way to describe it.  No modesty.  No comment about weather.  Just a simple response that perfectly described how it went.  It shows how fickle a run can be.  You might eat right and sleep well and get pumped up and find that perfect weather day and the workout turns into a stinker.  Everything lined up.  It should have been bragging rights!  Alas, it was not one of those runs.

On the other end you are trying to squeeze the intervals in.  You’ve been eating like crap.  Sleep has been neglected.  That day you just rip the workout.  People will write poems of your workout you think.  They will speak of it in hushed whispers of reverence.

Like most things in life, our efforts usually fall somewhere in between.  Some runs are mostly cruddy and some are mostly pretty good.  In Buddhism they call it the Middle Path.  Extremes are unsustainable and undesirable.  If you can keep yourself to the middle, be consistent, maybe even have more good runs than bad runs then you will have success in running.  Whatever that means for you.

I think the pursuit of “one of those runs” is just as worthwhile as any time or distance.  Outside of PRs, or an occasional surprise performance, some of my most memorable miles were just “some of those miles”.  An honorable, accurate, and simple way to refer to our days on the roads, tracks, and trails.