Tuesday thanks:

a) for the prolonged warm fall weather, b) for the pleasant (if breathy) chats with friends during a Monday evening run, and c) for youthful running leaders who run slowly on purpose and pretend they are not plodding along for my sake. God bless their skinny hearts.

Here it is, week five out of eight and I managed a 7.3 kilometre run for last week’s required long, slow distance.  Last night we did 3 kilometres in just over 22 minutes. Increasing speed on the shorter distances is getting a little easier, much to my surprise, if only by a couple of minutes.

In college, I took a fitness test from the resident kinesiology student in the athletic department (What was her name…right, Jennifer). After studying my results—which indicated that I was flexible rather than fast and strong—Jen told me it was likely because of the kind of muscle fibres I had.

“Slow-twitch fibres are great for endurance,” she said, “and fast-twitch fibres are great for speed and short bursts of strength. Your muscles are probably composed mostly of slow-twitch fibres.”

What a great excuse! Feel free to use it.

I’ve spouted it often when I didn’t want to expect much from myself. I figured it was enough just to be out there huffing and puffing. “Well, I’m just not built for speed,” I said.

And isn’t that what life is like? To achieve anything worthwhile, you have to do quite a lot of huffing and puffing. The uphill battle, I think it’s called. You have to expect a bit more from yourself in those times.

Therefore, I don’t trust anybody who appears to have succeeded in life without reasonable effort.

This week’s long, slow distance requirement is 8 kilometres, plus a 4 kilometre run and a 3 kilometre run between today and Saturday.