I’m using a very small disruption to my daily routine to better explore how I deal with roadblocks and setbacks.
I go for a walk every day. Almost every day, some days I don’t do the walk because I’m busy or sick or lazy. On a good week, I hit seven out of seven days with a 1 hour dedicated walk, outside, along the same path.
Lately, I haven’t been able to do my preferred path, but only just slightly. The annoyance is that the slight deviation means I have to work around a part of my path that has significance in my attempt to permanently modify my routine. That was a long sentence, so let me try and illustrate this. Actually, that gives me an idea…
Okay, so here’s a little sketch – neither to scale nor exact, but just for the idea. My walk takes place on one of the town’s many great foot and bike paths. The path I use swings right behind my condo, and naturally that’s where I start, indicated on the shitty sketch as the uppercase “A”. I walk this path as it winds around the lovely, calming woods and creek until I hit an underpass somewhere around “B”, then turn around and head home along the same path. According to the GPS tracking on the fitness app I use, the round trip is something like 3.8 miles.
The path has some really nice features, including some good hills for running. Another is a nice amount of privacy. Both of those are key here, because starting around the end of last month, April, I decided I was overdue to start ramping up the challenge of my daily walks. I used to run, like a lot, and it was good for my health. Both physically and mentally. I know it’s not for everyone, but I’m among a lot of folks that really benefit from regular runs.
Okay, so about three quarters of the way into my total walk, like half-wayish of the return side of things, I’ve started Interval Running. For the uninitiated, that means I’d do timed stretches of running and walking, then repeat until whatever. This is a well worn and, I think, well researched strategy for improving your cardio or just getting up to speed on running in general. I did this before, years ago, and it was great. And it feels good to be doing it again.
The path and its various features helps to boost this strategy with the hills and privacy. There’s a great hill right at the beginning of the section of the path where I like to start my first running interval, which on the sketch is somewhere between the lowercase “b” and the “2”. I start a little before this hill to warm up, than I absolutely charge that hill like my life depends on it. The hill crests onto the turnabout of a quiet end-street, which is a great place to slow down to a jog or walk and shake it out. Cross the street and back onto the path is pretty level, then the hill rolls back down, and I ride a comfortable speed jog-ish with the downhill until I hit the next interval. Run, walk, run, walk, and so on, prioritizing uphill sections for hard sprints and downhill sections for slower jogs or shuffles. You know, interval training. And I keep on like this until I reach the backyard of my condo, at which point I can comfortably dissemble and drag myself (figuratively, don’t freak out) back home.
The problem is that there has been a sewage emergency. I don’t know the specifics and they aren’t really relevant to the situation anyway, but the specifics that I do know and that do matter is how they are dealing with this problem. From what I understand, there was a pipe burst and some overflow or something, following a recent freak storm surge. The town’s water works department is fixing it, and to accomplish this, they have run a temporary pipe and a series of pumps and other equipment to redirect the flow of the creek (the blue line on the sketch) around the area that needs repair. For the repair and redirect, it means they have to block off access to that part of the creek and the bath that runs along it, which is marked on the sketch as “1” and “2”. That whole section of path between those two numbers is inaccessible to me, and will likely remain so until at least mid July. And that makes me salty.
I mean, I’m not salty at the town or the folks doing the repairs. Stuff happens and frankly I’m happy it’s getting fixed. Also, I don’t want to get in the way of the workers, so even if they don’t need to, them blocking the section off is a good call. But things like this are disruptive of people’s daily goings on. Some people use this path to get to and from work every day, and this must be a major pain in the ass for them. It’s only a minor pain in the ass for me, but I think we’d all prefer our asses to remain pain free. The part that’s top of mind for me is that I can’t skip the exercise, and I haven’t, but I have felt compelled to postpone the ramp-up. The running part, that is.
A similar disruption happened around the same time last year and in about the same area, though the specifics on that, which also don’t matter, were slightly different. At the time, I was really not in the mood for a redirect, and couldn’t find anywhere to get up to date information on when the path would open back up, and really didn’t trust my health to scout equivalent alternatives. So I just skipped it entirely for like, the entire summer. And that wasn’t great for me.
For this year’s disruption, I know I can’t just skip it. And my health has improved enough that I can explore alternatives more readily. So on one of my walks, I decided to just let it take as long as it takes while I poke around the edges of the construction zone. I was looking for where the path is blocked and where I can get on and off of the path to keep it as close to the original plan as possible. There aren’t a lot of good options in the direction that I like to go, there’s really just the street. I followed that and hopped back onto the outlets of the path, trying to find the earliest unblocked section just past the zone. What I found is what I now use, indicated by the greenish “a”, “b”, and dashed line between them on the sketch.
The result is a walk that is slightly shorter and slightly less pleasant, but more or less the same. The street detour is not fun, but being able to just keep on is a huge improvement over my response to last year’s disruption, so let’s call that a win. But it does bum me out a bit, because I had just set myself a goal and this throws that off.
The goal is to try and run a full, unbroken mile by the middle of June. I was not actually expecting to make this goal, but I was expecting to make some serious progress on it. Around that time, I’d go for my challenge run attempt, see how I did, then use that mid-June check-in to get an idea where and when to put an updated goal. However, there is no way I can make any progress on this goal if I can’t practice toward it, and with the disruption, I find myself not even a little motivated to maintain my interval training. How can I run if I’m not running?
Look, I know this is a “me” problem, okay, you don’t need to explain this or offer me any solutions. I have plenty of options, not the least of which is to just do the same interval run but on the section that is temporarily the street. If I hate the street that much, I can see take the path in the other direction (which I avoid because it’s mostly street and it sucks), drive to a different path, do the walk at a different section of the same path, go to a gym and use the treadmill, and hey, I got more options than those. I have an embarrassment of options, it’s really not a huge issue. And I”m most likely to do the simplest, either do the run in the middle section or just deal with the street. Small as it is, that is the central conflict.
I’m not exactly jazzed for either idea. The middle-run option doesn’t mesh with how I like to train. I like to do that running session like there’s nothing left and I give everything I have to it. If I shift this to the middle, I can’t do that. And then there’s the street option. And I fuckin’ hate the street option.
Not only does the street lack the same interesting and challenging set of hills, it also lacks the crucial privacy where I can struggle with the reasonable expectation that the only folks who will see me struggle are others in similar struggles. There is a sort of comfort in the shared use of the shared space, even with slightly different intentions and expectation. I’m not bothered by the cyclists on the path, nor are they bothered by me. Likewise, dog walkers, parents with strollers, and folks commuting on foot are all fair to be there, and we all regard each other with the same levels of neighborly “leave-each-other-aloneness”, and it’s good. It’s great.
The street (or rather sidewalks) that line it are not fun to walk and fully suck ass to run on. I don’t want to run up there, it blows. There isn’t enough tree cover, there is too much car traffic, there isn’t the same level or type of privacy, and the sidewalks are uneven and a danger to my shitty ankles. I don’t wanna run up there, it stinks.
I’m making myself chuckle with this post a little. Frankly, I didn’t need to recount as much of the situation as I did. You didn’t need to know all that, and likely don’t care. I could put it a bit differently – I go for a daily walk with an occasional run, and the section I like to run on is currently blocked off by the city and it sucks. Done and dusted. But I don’t know, I think the story and picture are more fun.
Anyway, all of that is to say that I’m taking this as a challenge. It can be an exercise in dealing with disruptions. I have other options, and this is a good excuse to explore a few of them. None of them are ideal, but I know that ideal is the enemy of good. I’ll give the street run a try this week, but I’ve got a feeling that I’ll shift to a different location. I think it sucks to drive to a place to run, but whatever. It’s just for a while, and better to be slightly uncomfortable to keep up what I need than to suffer the effects of just not doing it.