Monadnock Regional Milers

I hesitate to say warmer weather is right around the corner, but during the month temperatures are certain to move towards the warmer end of the winter weather spectrum, and you’ll be tempted to break out the shorts without having the running pants over the top of them. I find March to be refreshing in that I see bare ground beginning to poke through the cover of snow.

At this point I’ve spent two months or more away from the various trails and grassy surfaces I use to supplement the training I do on the roads. While most of my mileage is founded on asphalt, I truly enjoy getting off of it in order not to just give my legs a break, but my mind as well.

Running off road has it’s psychological benefits as well as it’s physiological benefits. While less pounding is good on joints, faster turnover saves both the muscles in the legs and teaches efficiency, the switch to undulating terrain with varied surfaces aids the psyche even more. There is nothing like the anonymity of being out in the woods, without particular trail markings and distances well known, that allows the mind to relax, to reboot, to remember why we are drawn to this pursuit.

For the most part, very few of us started running because we were already accomplished at it. We started for other reasons, maybe for fitness, maybe for something to do, maybe because we enjoyed pushing ourselves. But we’ve kept at it because it brings us some amount of joy, a joy that for the vast majority of us rooted in the fact that, at times, when we put away the watch and let our fitness and mind set determine the pace, allowing us to feel a sense of freedom. A freedom to run how we feel. I probably won’t hit the trails until well after the first of the month, and it might not even be until April that I get to go out and get one of those kind of runs in. But March tells me it’s coming. There will be some weeks where I will spend more time trying to avoid mud and puddles, keeping the shoes dry so they don’t weigh me down. But I know that somewhere in there I’ll get some of these runs in.

By summer I’ll be desperate to “hit the woods” in an effort to avoid the heat. And I know in mid June I will have some very up-tempo runs on the Widerness Trail in Lincoln, NH. I’ve been doing these runs for the past five years and have well recorded the time and effort those runs have taken me. My summer job takes me to North Conway three times a week and I use this opportunity to get in a solid workout on the relatively flat old railroad bed which is slightly uphill on the way out, slightly downhill on the way back. I run three miles out to Franconia Falls or five miles to the Bond Cliff trail, then turn around and run negative split on the way back. With the slight downhill, the run back can get quite fast.

As always, I will measure the time the run took. I will compare the effort and times, but unlike a calculated tempo workout on a well run road circuit, the conditions of the day will prevail, not the need to match or beat the times I’ve posted previously. I will finish breathless, sweat and mud covering the parts of me not covered with clothes, spent. I will soak my sore body in the cold water of the Pemigewasset, removing both the dirt and the effort from my legs. As I sit there on the rocks, I will relish the effort, not the time, that went into this run.

I will have run by feel.