Friday Ramble 01/08/21

This week in the Friday Ramble: Learning from defeat, the joy of journaling, breathing while running, and a killer veggie soup recipe.

Unless I’m forgetting a first-place finish in the 50-yard dash from sixth grade field day, I’m pretty sure I’ve lost every race I’ve ever run. That’s ok. For most of us, the point of running races is not to win, but to challenge ourselves to be our absolute best on a particular day. The reward is the knowledge that we put forth an honest effort, and maybe a t-shirt. 

Let me say right here that I freaking love competing. It’s not just running faster than someone else and beating them to the finish line. It’s the demoralized look on their face when I blaze up a hill they’re walking, or the bewildered head snap when you blow past them in the final stretch with a closing kick. 

That dynamic works both ways, of course. When someone catches me from behind or flies like a gazelle down a rocky descent I can be pissed off and angry, or I can focus my energy on staying true to my goals. That internal battle is what competition is all about for me. 

When the race is over, I make sure to shake hands with as many of my competitors as possible and wish them well. If they held off my charge or were stronger on the hills or faster on the descents, then I thank them for a great race. As hard fought as these in-race challenges may be, they’re just a memory by the time I get home. 

As runners, we know that the true competition is not with each other, but with ourselves. Did we do everything we could to get ready, or were there things we could have done better to prepare? If we’re being honest with ourselves, we already know the answers to those questions when we come to the starting line. 

I’ll be real. I used to struggle with that. I’d make excuses and lie to myself about what I had done, or not done, in training. Unless it went absolutely perfectly, which it never does, I’d go into a funk and lash out at imaginary adversaries like the weather or the water station that wasn’t set up properly. 

That began to change when I started running trail races. There are so many variables out in the woods you can’t possibly control that you’ll make yourself crazy if you worry about them. Plus, you find out real quick in trail races that some people are just fitter, faster, and better prepared. And here’s the kicker: most of the time you can’t tell who they are until deep into a race. 

At my first rail race -- a half marathon in Vermont -- there was a kid, maybe in his early 20s, who had all the flashy, expensive gear. Looks like a pro, I figured. When I passed him around Mile 9, he cursed at me. After the race, he screamed profanities at his mother and girlfriend while whining about a dozen different factors that affected his performance. A real peach, this kid. 

While I never acted out like that even in my jerkiest moments, the impulse underneath was the same: blaming outside forces, refusing to take responsibility, an inability to accept the outcome as legitimate. It’s all bullshit. 

I’m concerned that too many people don’t know how to lose anymore. Hang around youth sports for any length of time and you’ll hear all manner of garbage about cheating refs or unfair advantages. Pro sports are no better. God forbid a bad call goes against someone at the end of a playoff game, it’s clearly a conspiracy coordinated at the highest levels of the league office. 

There’s this idea that accepting defeat is showing weakness. That’s bullshit too. 

The truth is you can learn a lot about yourself when you get beat. Not only about what you can do better in training, but about humility and respect. It takes real strength to acknowledge shortcomings, and courage to address them. Most of all, it requires honesty and self-awareness. 

Here’s hoping for a lot more of that in 2021.  

The radical truth of journaling

One way I try to stay grounded with running is by keeping a journal. Since no one else gets to read it, I can be as honest as I need to be with myself. I highly recommend the practice. 

I started writing a journal in the summer of 2017 and reading it back now is a trip. Some of it makes me cringe -- I wasn’t in a great place mentally at that point -- and some of it feels powerful, like my reaction following a breakthrough 5K that fall. 

I did it. I really did it. 18 minutes and 50 seconds. I didn’t just get it, I crushed it. God damn! 

Most of my entries are not so dramatic. They’re actually pretty mundane. I start by recording basic info like date, distance, climb, and pace. I’ll also note whether I had a workout to go along with the run. I might make mention of the weather or if some piece of gear was bothering me. There could be a couple of sentences about the run or several pages, depending on how much time I have or whether I have anything to say.  

That documentation comes in handy in all sorts of ways. When I come down with a bit of knee soreness, for example, I can look back in my journal and be reminded that I felt a tweak doing air squats the previous week and back off a bit. 

There have been so many times when I’ve wondered in my journal if I’m overdoing it, only to realize too late that yep, I’ve been overdoing it. One of my goals this year is to not only listen to what my body is saying, but act responsibly when it’s telling me something I don’t want to hear. 

Question for the mouth breathers (like me)

Anyone who’s ever started running after a long layoff will know the particularly uncomfortable feeling that comes from trying to breathe while engaged in said activity. While it may seem like these huffing and puffing runners are oblivious to their heavy breathing, those of us who have been there know it’s exactly the opposite. We’re acutely aware of our breathing, so much so that it becomes a distraction.  

The reason you huff and puff in the beginning is that it’s difficult to draw full breaths. As your aerobic capacity improves, so does your breathing. That’s one of those cool physiological things that starts to happen when you run or exercise regularly. 

I’ve worked hard on my breathing the last few years, mostly through meditation and other practices. (My favorite: 10 deep breaths in through the nose, 10 deep exhales through the mouth like you’re blowing wind into a sail with a slight pause after each inhale and exhale.) 

I’ve experimented with nasal breathing while running on occasion, even going so far as to count breaths up to 100. It’s hard to do, but throwing it into the mix can help break up a monotonous run. Still, I breathe primarily through my mouth, albeit a lot more slowly and under control than I did when I started. 

All of this preamble leads to an interesting question from Chris Barnewell 

Chris Barnewall @ChrisBarnewall

@Pflanns Any plans to write about breathing while running? I feel like I need to train myself to do in the nose out the mouth but I’ve also heard it doesn’t actually matter

You’ll be shocked to know that there’s lots of conflicting information about the “proper” way to breathe while running. Go ahead and Google breathing while running and you’ll get mountains of posts that say one thing or another with no definitive conclusion to be found. 

In times like these, I search out writers I trust, like Alex Hutchinson. He’s the author of the phenomenal book, Endure, which gets into a lot of these types of questions. In his Sweat Science column for Outside, Hutchinson wrote about the idea of synchronizing your breath to your running cadence. 

There’s a lot of fascinating stuff in that piece, but the main takeaway for me is the notion that consciously trying to breathe makes it harder to breathe unconsciously. It seems to me that the application for running is that there is no, “right way to breathe.” Merely being cognizant of your breath, however, is a great place to start. 

The simple goodness of veggie soup

We had a lot of great responses to the Four Pillars post. It’s really cool that so many of you are also on similar journeys in regards to food and sleep. One question that came up was about food staples. 

During the winter, we make a lot of soups. For a long time, chicken noodle was a particular favorite. My wife (bless her) found this recipe from Runners World and adapted it once I went vegetarian. For the record, she’s not a vegetarian and neither is our child, although he did go through a “vegetarian” phase in preschool and then kept wondering why he wasn’t getting chicken nuggets. 

We now adapt the recipe by adding carrots and kale, swapping in vegetable broth, omitting the chicken entirely, and using fewer potatoes while serving it over farro. It sounds more complicated than it is, but the basic gist is to load up on the veggies, legumes, and fiber and have dinner on the table in about half an hour. It’s also perfect the next day for lunch. 

How about you? Any good go-to soups or meals for post-run nourishment?