Recovery is Hard

The human body is an amazing thing. When you run, what you're doing to your body is basically the equivalent of taking a baseball bat to your car. You're just smashing it and trashing it and slashing the tires and dropping a big pile of sweaty men all over the top of it. And after a good run that's about what your body should feel like.

But the amazing thing about the human body is that it's like if you woke up the next day and in your driveway is a better car than the one you've had before. And it's because you wrecked it the previous day. It's like if someone made a car for you and said, "Does this suit your driving and emotional needs?" And you said, "Nooooooo!" and did everything in your power to ruin it and the person was like, "Fine! I'll try harder!" and purposefully set out to build something that was even harder for you to destroy.

But, the problem is that eventually you do so much damage to the car that it can't repair itself overnight. It needs more time. But you don't want to give it more time. Why would you? You've been let in on this secret process where destruction, sheer self-indulgent destruction is yielding this positive gain. It's this powerful sense of improvement that seems to run completely against the way life is supposed to be. Cars aren't supposed to repair themselves! Cake doesn't taste better the more you bake it. You can't set cake on fire and wait a couple hours and get better cake. But with running you can.

It becomes really hard to stop destroying the car when all you can think about is how much it will improve the car, all you hear in your head is, "Make it better! Make it better!". Even when the car clearly can't repair itself anymore. Even when every day the car is getting crappier and crappier you press on and break it even more because you're convinced that the next morning you're gonna wake up and it's all going to be repaired and you're gonna drive it to the Grand Canyon and drive off the edge and it will sprout wings and jet engines and you'll fly to Malaysia and be a pop sensation. And that's what's going on in your head as you continue to mercilessly wreck a struggling piece of machinery.

So eventually you have to say, "After I'm done wailing on these tail lights with a golf club for the next thirty minutes, I'm not gonna think about the car at all. I'm gonna give it a whole week to rest up."

And that's so hard to do! But, you have to trust. You have to have faith. Given enough time and rest, the car will be better.

Then you can go back to smashing the everloving bejeezus out of it.

And most importantly for me is learning to just enjoy the smashing process and not trying to use it for any specific gain. Like a race or being at a certain level by a certain time. As long as you focus on making sustainable improvements over an indefinite period of time, then you won't be as tempted to push yourself too hard to meet some predetermined level of fitness. Which is usually why I get injured.

My favorite part though is imagining the running community as a group of people all marveling over the various ruined states of their cars that they've put hours in to destroying. Just a graveyard of freakish, mutilated cars with weird adaptations and ill-proportioned fenders and the owners standing in front of them proudly, just nodding their heads, thinking, "Yup, she's a real beauty. Been taking a crowbar to the rearview mirror since I was fifteen years old and now it's the size of the backseat and the backseat is the size of a box of Wheat Thins." He's also just saying completely crazy things.

"Blackberries turn into vampire bats at night and try to do geometry in my bathroom cabinets. I'm the luckiest little bugle boy in all of Ireland!"