It’s been over a week since my last post. I haven’t been too lazy nor has life been uneventful in the world of running. To the contrary, I’ve been extremely busy. Usually I battle hills and fatigue, but this week I was in a fierce battle against my sinuses and a touch of the flu. Though my illness got a few good licks in, I do believe I’ve emerged victorious. Unfortunately, I missed the best weekend for running, as well as missing my own personal goal of reaching my 100-mile mark. It was sunny and in the 70s this past weekend and I was lying in bed with an achy body, sore throat and headaches like you couldn’t believe.

I’ve felt pretty good the past couple of days, but I won’t venture out for a run until Friday or Saturday. Because I got sick so late in my training for the Germantown Half Marathon, which is March 16th, I’ve had to alter my mental focus for that race. Before, I was really gunning to beat my St. Jude time, but now I’m going to shoot to finish. I’ve gotten up to nine miles in my training, so I’m pretty confident that I can finish without a bunch of problems, but I’m not anticipating beating any personal records.

Congrats to Derek for his awesome performances in the challenges.

Congratulations to Derek for his terrific clean sweep in the most miles, 1 mile, 3k and 5k challenges in February, well done! The March challenges are now under way and from this month forward, we have a monthly challenge open to all our readers and visitors. We’d be glad to have you run with us!

Now, please don’t take my post title the wrong way. It’s not a lack of creativity or dedication to the cause, but rather I believe Scott must’ve read my mind when he published his last post.

My mom’s training for the ING half marathon in Atlanta, GA. She wanted to spend some quality time with me, so we went running last Saturday. Our desired distance was eight miles. I was a little nervous because the last time I ran that distance, I ended up killing myself for the sake of having a better ranking in the challenges. This has been stated before, but I really feel that it can’t be reinforced enough: while it’s good to push yourself, you definitely SHOULDN’T over train.

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Although I’ve been running regularly for the best part of 16 months now, I hit a point this month where it was really hard to get motivated and go running. A couple of factors influenced this state of mind, including a lack of sleep that consequently left me feeling too tired to run first thing in the morning (my preferred time to run), but also perhaps because I increased my mileage by 36% between December 2007 (69.69 miles) and January 2008 (95.47 miles) in an attempt to win a Nike+ challenge. As experts will attest to, the 36% increase in miles is too much of an increase within one month. The strange thing however, is that it wasn’t physical fatigue I felt this month, but more psychological fatigue. Why do I suddenly not want to go running? Why does the mere thought of running not interest me at the moment? Questions such as these have been running through my head and keeping me lying in bed first thing in the morning instead of embracing the dawn sunrise and getting out there to run.

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Last night I had a TERRIFIC five miler. It was a little cold outside when I started, but that little inconvenience soon disappeared. I felt really good right afterwards, partly because I knew tonight I would just have to run a quick three miler, rest tomorrow, and then eight miles on Sunday; that was until I remembered that my wife and I have dinner plans with some friends right after work.

However, it wasn’t that big of a deal. I decided to get up a little earlier in the morning and knock it out. I was out the door this morning a little later than I would have liked, but still on schedule. I jumped on the treadmill and started my five minute warm up when I realized I had forgot my iPod®. DAMN!!! I started to convince myself that what was important complete my miles not whether or not I had music or my chip to log this run. I decided to suck it up and do what I came to do.

Yea…that lasted literally two minutes. I don’t know if I was just tired from the night before or just lazy, but I didn’t have ANY energy to keep going so I bowed out. I was very disappointed in myself, but I guess that is why we fall of the horse every now and then…so that we can get up and get back on.

I don’t know if the planets were aligned, or if was just my lucky day, but my run last night felt great. I ended up having lunch with an old friend, Vince Perryman, who got me into cross-country running while I was in high school. The difference between Vince and myself is that, oh yeah, he is an elite runner and hasn’t stopped running since the age of 14. I mentioned to Vince my born-again dedication to running.

While explaining some of the recent trials and tribulations with my training plan for the Germantown Half Marathon, Vince offered some astute and simple advice:

“Don’t think about always beating your personal best. There is a fine line between pushing yourself during training and pushing yourself over the limit. You might not only injury yourself physically, but break yourself mentally.”

While I was suffering through the St. Jude/Memphis Half Marathon in December, Vince was setting a personal best for the FULL marathon. When asked what made this race different, he said it was because he didn’t worry about anything but the current moment. He didn’t over think his strategy. He just ran HIS race.

So last night I stood out in my front yard and told myself that I was going to forget about the challenges and just run. I would run hard, but smart. I ran right past the Pyramid when I heard, “400 meters to go!” I thought to myself that I would sprint the last distance. I didn’t think about how far I had already run nor did I think about what my pace was or might have been. I just ran my way.

When I completed my last 400 meters and ended my workout, I heard that WONDERFUL, welcoming female voice telling me I had beat my personal best and I was very happy with my average pace per mile. Furthermore, I was excited to just be out there, enjoying my run again, oh — and not falling down and almost breaking my finger, like I did last week!

Each month, the writers and producers of this Web site participate in some friendly competition with several friends and colleagues. While half the runners live in Memphis, Tennessee in the USA, the other half live within the English counties Hertfordshire and the West Midlands. That’s one of the great attractions and conveniences to Nike+ challenges and Nike+ in general — friends can compete against each other no matter what their geographical location may be, or what time of day or night they run. It’s only until all the running data from each individual run is uploaded to the Nike+Web site that we get to compare and contrast our performances against one another.

View this month’s challenges

Knowing that your friends are trying to run faster or maybe further than you, is what inspires and motivates us to keep in shape and run as best as we can. Whether we know it or not, we are motivating one another by each individual mile we run. Now that we’ve made our challenges public for the world to see, we now have a little more motivation and incentive to get up and run each day.