Fraser Darcy

I started out this week thinking ‘when does life get easier?’. I won a race on Sunday, I had two weeks of ‘holidays’ where I ran almost 300km’s and completed three races plus some good training sessions. Then, to finish these ‘holidays’ I jumped straight in the car, drove 4 hours home to Quorn and got prepared for Term 3 at school. No easing back into it for the school term, straight back into the Monday-Friday grind. To add to the pressing weight of beginning a 10-week term the weather was bitterly cold in Quorn. I’m talking of ‘feels like’ temperatures of 0 degrees or below on Monday through to Wednesday. And just because I won Sunday’s race doesn’t mean suddenly all my running training gets easier. It’s actually the opposite after a hard 30km race. The shiny trophy you get doesn’t unlock the door to Nirvana or cure all the aches and niggles that come from running 140km per week.

I jogged through Monday and Tuesday ruminating over when life gets easier. I can keep pushing through the soreness and the pressure I put on myself at work and in running but to what point? It’s not like I’m getting any faster over the last few weeks with my training, I’m just building up the tolerance to endure the same pace for longer (in prep for the marathon). I’m also not getting any major improvements with my teaching. But the fear of it all is if I take my foot off the accelerator of life or change strategies in the hope of making things easier for myself for a week or so will I actually regress in my training? And will life then get harder to build it back up?

I figured I had to try something different this week because it was clear from this self-reflection that mentally and physically I needed a bit of a freshen up. I hadn’t had a week running under 125km’s since early June and this week would probably be my last chance before the Adelaide Marathon. A ‘down’ week it was then! Instead of aiming for some intensity on Tuesday I jogged a few more easier and shorter runs all the way up until Friday. I even went on a couple of leisurely bike rides to do something different. The body responded pretty well and by Friday arvo I got back into a bit of a tempo session. Part of me wanted to keep the down week going until Sunday but then part of me also wanted to test if my niggles had actually recovered by themselves (which it felt like they had by Thursday night). I’m talking niggles in my shins, my ankles and the top of my quads. I didn’t quite have the zappiness back in my legs but the niggles weren’t necessarily there either. The tempo run I did on Friday arvo was good and didn’t uncover any pains or aches and I also hadn’t drastically lost fitness so it’s likely the down week has been successful. How successful though? Time will tell next week if I can drop straight back into a regular week with intensity and without these same niggles I cleared up this week.

The other change I made this week was that I continued ramping up the intensity in the classroom. When I started it was very ‘gently gently’ so I didn’t step on anyone’s toes and also so I figured out how the teaching game worked. Towards the end of last term I started upping the expectations of being punctual to class, having spare pencils for every Tom, Dick and Harry who didn’t have one and doing my best to ensure students started to show some respect and call me by my name ‘Mr.Darcy’ instead of just ‘Mr.’ because they’re too lazy. But those changes haven’t been enough to get them learning better. Like an AFL coach looking for a new tactic when their team’s behind in the 3rd quarter, I threw some positional changes by moving the desks into a better arrangement in one of my classes. Cue the chorus of ‘what’s this? this is shit!’ from two of my classes. Deal with it. This is how you might learn better because you don’t seem to learn much in the old arrangement. A few days into the new set-up and so far, like the down week, the early indicators are positive. But, like the down week, I’ll only know how successful it has been as time goes on for the rest of the term. (The blog also got a mention in class this week so this paragraph serves as a test to those students to see if they’re actually reading this…).

To top this week off, it’s like the universe has realised how fed up I was with the cold weather and started to make it’s own changes too. From Thursday onwards, the warmth and sunshine in the afternoons has been a pleasant treat. Hanging the clothes out on the washing line on Friday arvo after my tempo run I was reminded of how good life is here in summer when it’s hot, the running feels good and the clothes dry in an instant. On my long run this morning the sun was beaming down and I could actually feel it’s warmth unlike the sun here in June that seemed to just be an illusion of heat. Sure, spring is still a month away but the back end to this week at least gave me hope that things are changing for the good, both weather-wise, work-wise and running wise. In answer to my question then, I think life gets easier when you pull the right levers on the highly complex and integrated machine that has no instructions or handy IKEA DIY pictures that life is. It’s hard to know when and what levers to pull but this week I think I pulled the right levers. Time will tell.