Rereading Karnazes, Looking Over My Own Running Goals

Once again I've picked up one of my favorite books and am now rereading it.  It's Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner, by Dean Karnazes.  As you might easily have guessed, this is a book about long-distance running.  The author is a renown "ultra" runner, choosing distances far beyond the 26.2 mile marathon event. Once he even ran in a 199-mile relay event...only he ran ALL of the race's 36 legs by himself!  I have no plans to ever enter a race for more than 26.2 miles...and for the immediate future I'm just interesting in races between 5K (3.1 miles) and the half-marathon (13.1 miles).  But Karnazes, or "Karno" as he is affectionately called by friends, so effectively and enthusiastically crystallizes the importance of boldness, clarity, and determination for his running that his example is applicable not only for anyone attempting more modest distances in running, but also for people engaging in other sports...or other endeavors, for that matter.

It's important for people to recognize their own limitations, as Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan character would say in the movie Magnum Force.  But with this realism also must come a "can do" attitude that recognizes one's potential for growth and success...and be willing to undertake the hard work necessary to bring about significant positive change in the targeted area.  It is also important to be specific about one's goals: for Karno, it was about becoming trained for certain upcoming races and then successfully finishing them within his time goals. Lately that goal-oriented behavior for me has languished, to be replaced by routine-based behavior.  For the past three weeks I have been dealing with strained back issues, which made the question of me looking forward to any races in the immediate future a moot point.  Before that happened, my typical running pattern had been for most of the year a matter of me fitting in my "miles" without a discernible goal in the near future.  That doesn't mean that, during the course of a calendar year, interesting races didn't come up for me to participate in.  But I either hadn't been training up to them or had given such events a low priority, making it easy for me to pass them by.

This year I would like to step up my running to a level that gives me the confidence to enter and run well in any half-marathon race, at any time of the year.  That's where my routine comes in.  Now for those half-marathon races: I need to check my favorite half-marathon calendar website and begin planning for more distant races up north to run in during the hotter (and too hot for Florida) summer months.  And now this is where Ultramarathon Man can help me.  I first read this book a little more than four years ago, and it greatly helped to inspire me to train for my first ever half-marathon race.  Hopefully, reading it again will help me recover some of that earlier enthusiasm.  But also, I hope to gain some fresh insights from Karnazes' writing, as so often happens when I go back over material I've covered before...