Running Mojo

Where oh where has my running mojo gone?

I've been asking myself that question for months. At some point last year running just got hard. Hard to get out of bed, hard to get out the door, hard to get motivated to lace up my shoes. No matter how I tried to motivate myself or bribe myself there was just no getting around it. Running wasn't fun. It felt like work. Something that I had to so that whenever someone asked if I was a runner while I was helping them in one of our stores I could say yes.

It finally got to a point where I just stopped running. Why go for a run when none of them go well? For a week and a half I did nothing other than work. Why did I dislike running so much? Finally it dawned on me that my emotional side was clouding everything. With two music degrees and nearly 15 years of playing music professionally I am good at channeling my emotions into work. They always live just under the surface ready to come out. Even now in marketing I am still channeling emotion in the stories and images I help craft. All of the emotions there mixing with the stress of a new job, long hours, and jury duty. Every day I would wake up and just know that if I tired running nothing would go right.

Finally one day I just decided to try. So I laced up my shoes, left my GPS watch sitting on my dresser and just ran until I wanted to turn around. It wasn't amazing, but I didn't hate it. I wasn't being held hostage by my watch, a training plan, or the feeling that I wasn't living up to my own expectations. I tried new cross training and strength workouts. Heck sometimes I even made them up as I went. I changed the time of day I was running. Somehow waiting until I got the work that was stressing me out done helped me relax and feel more free. I even liked running in the heat of the afternoon & evening. For nearly 10 years I've trained for one race after an another. Now I'm just trying to find my running mojo, and rediscover that running can be fun.