Funky Town

I didn’t run last Wednesday. It wasn’t a planned rest day, I wasn’t injured, and my calendar wasn’t exactly packed with appointments and phone calls. I just didn’t feel like it, which is rare for me, but the feeling had been building for a couple days, if I’m being honest.

Maybe some of that is not having a race on the immediate horizon, which has made it hard to motivate for workouts (like I had planned to do that day), or maybe I was just so generally tired that running over to the track to knock out a set of 800m repeats on my own was the last thing that I wanted to do. I thought about heading out for a trail run instead, maybe a fartlek if I was feeling good, and even that seemed rather unappealing at the time. So I took a shower and got on with my day. I’ve been doing this long enough to know that some days it’s best just not to force it.

A couple hours later I got a text from my buddy Levi, pictured left here, asking if I wanted to join him and Matt, on the right, for a run the next morning. It didn’t take long for me to reply, “I’m in.” Turned out to be just what I needed to snap out of my mini mid-summer funk: a day off to reset, reflect, and recharge, followed by some conversational miles with friends on the trails—some of which my feet had never touched before—on a stunner of a morning that makes you appreciate, well, pretty much everything.