Tired vs Tired

After a discussion with my darling wife the other night I started thinking.

The discussion was about me claiming to be tired after work, she suggested that maybe I am doing too much running and swimming, and that maybe I should back off a little bit.

What I realized during this conversation was that I was not physically tired at all, I was mentally exhausted. In fact after our conversation I proceeded to go out and mow the lawns.

Mowing the lawns is an oddity in my life now, back in the days of unfit me, I used to mow the lawn and at the completion of the activity proceed to have a sleep because I was so spent I couldn't possibly do anything else for the rest of the day.

Now days I will often mow the lawns of an evening. One of the many revelations I have had because of running is to discover what it truly means to be tired. My job is to think all day, and often after a hard day of thinking I feel like my head is full of cotton wool, I get sluggish in my responses and Its almost like I'm drunk.

But this is nothing next to true physical exhaustion. After running the marathon I felt that I had some energy left, I was able to walk about 1k back to our friends place from the station, and was willing (although darling wife wouldn't have a bar of it) to push the pusher with both kids in it. The thing is though I felt that I still had energy in reserve. I should have pushed harder during the marathon but because I really didn't know what I was in for, and I was only looking to complete the distance, there was no need to push harder (next time will be different).

I have no regrets about my first marathon, it was an amazing journey, taking 13 months from my first 5k run, to complete the 42.2ks. This in itself is an incredible achievement for someone that used to have his colleagues collect things from the printer because it was too far to go. 

A week after Melbourne I was ready to run again. In fact I was itching to run again, so I did. However I was not prepared for the aftermath of that run. It seems that Melbourne had taken a toll on me that would have been unseen should I have heeded everyone's advice and given myself another week before running. But anyway the net result was that my body had been fighting a cold and winning until I hit it with a 10k run, and the cold won. This was an incredible smack in the face for me but anyway I digress.

Feeling tired has become a very subjective thing for me, physical exhaustion, mental exhaustion and muscular exhaustion are different things. I don't have the energy to process what you are saying vs I don't have the energy to get out there and run vs my legs feel like lead because I have just run 42k on them, I really didn't have any comprehension of these things what I was sedentary me. One of my favorite states of mind is after a run when the endorphins are going nuts and I am calm. I feel like a wave that has broken on the beach and is all foamy and cruising up and down the beach.

I remember wandering around the supermarket on a Sunday afternoon like a stoned teenager because I had run that morning. This is easily one of the best things about running. A legal high that is actually healthy for you...no wonder they say that running is for people who cant handle drugs and alcohol.