I ran a long run last year on a week when every signal was telling me to rest instead. It cost me nearly two weeks of feeling flat, and it’s still the clearest example I have of ignoring my own judgment.
I used to treat boredom on a long run as a problem to solve with music or podcasts. Nine years in, I’ve come to think it’s one of the more useful parts of the whole exercise.
My longest run has sat at roughly the same distance for a couple of years now, and I used to see that as a failure. Trying to push past it taught me it might actually be the right ceiling for me.
For years I insisted solo long runs were the only kind that counted. Then I actually tried the weekend club runs and had to admit I’d been wrong about what I needed.
One long run, somewhere around year four, went so badly that it changed how I run every long run since. It wasn’t the distance that got me. It was how fast I tried to cover it.
Nine years in, my weekend long run isn’t the steady upward line I expected. It grew, stalled, dropped to nothing, and grew again, and that messier shape turned out to matter more than the numbers.