I am generally an open book if questions are posed to me. This has provided the people that ask me questions a good understanding of where I lie regarding many things. When discussing studying for a final term test recently, I briefly explained why I hadn't really been preparing for the test despite its huge importance to my graduation timeline. Here's a paraphrase of what I said...
"I am far enough along in discovering my personal identity that I know what I am willing and not willing to tolerate. Knowing how miserable something will make me leaves me quite literally incapable of spending time doing it. So no, I haven't studied for my math final..."
I felt pretty happy about the quick and concise personal-identity-realization moment I had just had and have reflected on it much since. This brings me to relating it all to training and how it fits or doesn't fit into whatever daily life looks like at a particular time.
If running for 2 hours before work on a Sunday morning sounds awful when I wake up, there is an incredible chance that I won't do it. Does this affect my training? Hell yes. But training doesn't have the same pull it used to have over me anymore. I'm really happy with the balance I've been able to strike in the last few months. My volume of training is slightly less than it would be a year or two ago if I had similar fitness goals, but I'm okay with that. Race results are definitely big goals for me, but minimizing personal misery is by far more important. Now I want to get something straight, training rarely makes me anything close to miserable. But I think most any distance runner would tell you the compromises of comfort, sleep, stress, social lives, etc can be difficult to justify in place of training, which can be considered a pretty selfish act in the first place.
The moral this story is really just that a happy runner is a good runner. Obviously we all find happiness in different ways and places. I've known many runners (including myself) who at least occasionly struggle with truly wanting to put in the run or workout that's planned for the day. For me, following the path of least resistance toward general happiness and feeling good has lead me to some really fun running, great fitness, and a pretty different training schedule/routine than I've had in the past.
I'm just wanting to say training doesn't always fit into life very well, but there are ways to be fit and sleep-in on "those" mornings! I'm just really stoked to have the relationship I have with running and life combined.
