Fried

I finally have to face up to it.

I'm fried. Stale. Burned out. Overtrained. Whatever you want to call it- I've lost all joy in running, I feel like shit all the time, and I have no motivation whatsoever to even jog, much less train. I dropped out of the steeplechase today after 2 laps- I just didn't care what happened.

Over indoors, I raced somewhere around 20 times, and set personal bests at every distance from 400m to 5k. And you know what? I just don't have anything left to give. There's no adrenaline, no thrill. I've trained hard enough before to experience breakdown training-- I've trained through funk after funk and slump after slump. I've come intimately familiar with my physical and mental limitations. As my dyestat username suggests, I've spent a long time on the red line of training properly/doing too much.

I guess what I'm saying is that I can't do it anymore. I need some time off to recapture enjoying running. I've damaged myself pretty badly and no matter what anyone says, I know what my body and my mind needs. I'm hoping less than a week will do it, because I still want to race well in the post-season. But until my body tells me to go fast, I'm not forcing anything. I had my highest-mileage winter ever, my highest-intensity of workouts ever, and my best and most frequent season of racing ever. I am not capable of continuously going up and up and up and up like that.

With a little time to regather and collect myself, I'll bounce back from this stronger than ever. Until then, I'll be pounding water, dropping multivitamins, sleeping in instead of getting up to run, and catching up on long-neglected schoolwork. Hopefully, my next blog post will be next week, detailing my lovely 3-day break from running.

Thanks for reading, everyone, and thanks for all the support and kind words I've gotten from people about this blog.

-Craig

PS: Doug Ainscow, you have made the big time. Have a great season.