Dear Melissa,

You’ve often said that there are days where running just sucks. Then there are days where the run seems almost magical. Today, March 23, 2019, was one of the latter.

For whatever reason, everything just clicked. All of your muscles and joints seemed to work in perfect harmony. You tackled the hills like a mountain goat. You felt strong and confident. You could have kept running far longer than your scheduled five miles. You remembered exactly why you love running.

I’m writing you this for the other days. The days where it feels like your limbs belong to four different people, none of whom are you. For the days when things ache and you realize you’re not all that young anymore. For the days when you have no energy. For the days your confidence is shot and you question if you were meant to “do this running thing.”

It seems as though you’ve had more than your share of “bad” days lately. You started the Berlin Marathon with high hopes, but your legs just felt heavy that day. Sure, you pulled off a big PR, but something wasn’t quite right with your knee. Three weeks later, you had to walk a good portion of the Chicago Marathon course, only to sprain the bad knee when you tried to run across the finish line. You were impatient for it to heal and get “better” and you kept pushing. Several weeks of “two steps forward, one step backward” followed, which had you feeling down and worried that you might have to give up running altogether.

But things ultimately did start getting better. Maybe it was the end of the icy weather, literally putting you on more solid footing for your runs. Maybe it was finding the right combination of training and recovery that increased your steps forward and decreased the steps backward. You’re still not running at the level you were six months ago and your knee is not back to 100%, but you’re getting there. You’re so far ahead of where you were a month or two months ago. This week’s runs have been really good. Today’s run was amazing.

You’ll have more bad days. When that happens, just remember that it’s not the RUN that’s bad, it’s the other crap that’s going on around the run. And you can always learn something, even on the bad days. Try to find that lesson and remind yourself that another good run, another amazing run, is yet to come.

Keep running – you know you love it!

Sincerely,

Me (on a good run day)

P.S. You probably didn’t need that (not terribly elaborate) ruse to use the restroom at the gas station today. But it was fun!