It takes a lot to shut my brain up. Usually only sleep and even then not so much. I can never do just one thing at a time. I usually like to have multiple things happening at once because focusing on one thing just seems silly. My mother would tell you that’s how I avoid things.
Even running, my brain is never silent. I run thinking all the while how hard it feels. Or on good days, how easy it feels. I think about my shoes or how my shorts fit. Do I look funny in this outfit? What am I going to eat for dinner? Do I want to cheat or be good? How can I talk about this run in a blog post? Is it even worthy of that? Oh look, there’s that person who glares at me every time we pass each other. What did I do? How was work? What more do I have to get done tomorrow, have things been going ok or do I need to make adjustments? When’s that system upgrade happening again? I need to make sure we are ready. How’s my pace? Am I running too slow or too fast? And so on and so forth. For all the miles, all the time. I just can’t shut up. 🙂
Thursday was kind of a funny day. I had finally listened to my soreness from Firehouse and rested on Tuesday and Wednesday so I was looking forward to getting in a few miles after work. I was feeling better but still sore- I think the trail re-aggravated my hamstring issue- so I was just aiming for an easy run as opposed to the speed work on the plan. Previously mentioned system upgrade started that day and I was supposed to attend a business mixer after work but I just didn’t feel I had the capacity to mingle. I was feeling very off, not cranky but not exactly sociable. I decided to pass on the mixer and just run. But I could not decide where to run. I wasn’t feeling work town so I headed to the lake path. However when I got there I just kept driving. Ok, guess I wasn’t feeling that either. I ended up at the river path and really wasn’t expecting much. 5 miles later, I was done. 
I stretched out some and went home. It wasn’t until later that it hit me, I hadn’t thought of a single thing during that run. No work thoughts, no blog thoughts, no body thoughts, no life worries, not even any running thoughts, nothing. I just ran. And my brain was quiet and calm. So quiet.
That’s not to say that I was unresponsive to my surroundings. I remember nodding to everyone I passed. I looked both ways before crossing each intersection and there were 10. I dodged a praying mantis and then a stink bug about 20 yards later. I recall wrinkling my nose and trying not to breathe deeply when the smell from the brewery hit me in the face.* I saw that the guy driving the lifted Chevy was likely to blow through the cross walk but I wasn’t even mad when he did. My earphones fell out of my ears but I just put them back in and kept running. Normally these last few things would piss me off and linger for awhile. I even changed my route and ran more on the trail than normal just because. It wasn’t really a conscious decision, I just did it. 
It was nice to not think. It really was. How do I make that happen more often? I don’t even know what prompted it this time. 🙂 I checked my splits the next day and was pretty pleased with what I saw. Don’t give mile 4 too much credit, gravity was very helpful. 🙂
Now those annoyances- my headphones. I recently purchased wireless ear buds because I was tired of getting tangled in my other ones. The new ones are worse. I cannot get them to stay in my ears at all. I know I have odd ears but come on! I have switched the little rubber pieces 3x. Ugh. *The smell- a local brewery is having a little problem so as a result there has been a yeasty stench wafting around town for the last month or so. Sometimes it hits when you least expect it. 😦
How was your weekend?
Any headphone suggestions?
Ever run yourself silent?
