A few months ago I signed up for the Spieren voor Spieren (that’s “muscles for muscles” literally translated) City Run in Hilversum (the media capital of the Netherlands). I knew it was the week after Milan and I thought it would be fine since at Milan I was “only” running 7KM so no big deal right?
Milan came and went and I was pretty darned exhausted the week after, not to mention crazily busy at work and I thought “really, Pinky? what have you done!?” I was not really in the right mind set to do another race so soon afterwards.
The nice thing about it though, was that my colleague Sam, was also running! What I didn’t know was that it was her VERY FIRST race! And a 10K to boot! So probably by Wednesday/Thursday last week I was feeling it a little bit more and looking forward to at least meeting up with her and her partner and starting the race together.
Hubs was once again gracious enough to get out of bed early on a Sunday to accompany me to the race. Hilversum is not so far away, but not close either, so we still were out the door around 9:15 to start the journey to get there. I used to work in Hilversum (it’s where I worked when I first came to the Netherlands) and I have a soft spot for the place (many of my “firsts” in this country happened here) but I didn’t really research where the route would take me so I wasn’t sure exactly what to expect. Turns out the course went through the Media Park (never been there) so it was fun to see all the television studios. It also went up the street where I used to work and around one of my most favourite buildings in the country, the Hilversum Town Hall (by the famous architect Dudok)
The weather was fairly cooperative and I felt good and it turns out I ran my fastest 10K to date!
For me this is real improvement! In June of last year when I ran Rotterdam, if you recall correctly, it was completely on my bad knee. I had to stop running after this and now I know it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I’ve learned a lot about how to take care of myself in order to run better and stronger and I’ve learned something VERY important:
NEVER COMPARE YOURSELF TO OTHERS
YOU ARE YOU
YOU ARE UNIQUE
YOU HAVE YOUR OWN SPECIAL QUALITIES
I have been WAY more relaxed about running since I started up again and I have absolutely NO DESIRE to do any more than I know I am capable of at this time in my life.
When you are relaxed, you just perform better. When you don’t CARE if you PR or not, you just perform better. By that I mean, if you are good in your head, no matter what the outcome, it is ALL good.
As you can also see I have already some other races lined up and I am truly looking forward to them.
Excellent work! Wow – you do a lot of races! Impressive!
Thanks Heather! is it a lot? I feel like I missed out on quite a few when I was not running for 5 months!!
Woo hoo! Look at you with all your “running is so routine now” posts :) Great to see you are keeping up the good work. Changed your running training around lately? I know people who run and they are always talking about putting sprints or big uphill climbs into their runs to vary it a bit.
I haven’t changed much since I was doing more work in the gym, but if my gym problems continue this may be something in my future :)