I have an entrenched notion that if, when running, I have to relent and walk to rest, I've "blown" the run. I didn't admit it at the time, but when I ran in the La Jolla Half Marathon in 1988, I had to walk a major portion of the 420' hill between the 5.5 and 6.5 mile points. I still finished the race strong, but that walking spate had always been a dirty little secret, as if I hadn't REALLY completed the race. In my mind, walking is not running and in a running event, if you have to walk, you haven't successfully completed it.
I've had to overcome a similar conceit with regards to running itself. I have had a long-held notion that running and jogging were two different things. Jogging was the slow shuffling form of bipedal locomotion that non-athletes, beginners, old folks did to get in shape. Running was what competitors and athletes did. I wanted to run, not jog.
This probably explains why I never -- NEVER -- felt I'd truly completed any run over a 10K until just this past year. In high school cross country, I never completed anything longer than 5-6 miles without resorting to walking; probably because I didn't know how to pace myself and always tried to run at a 5K or 10K pace. Even during my 20s when I considered myself a reborn runner, I still dreaded anything longer than 10K and privately never gave myself credit for any runs greater than that since I never finished one without walking. Even though I claimed the '88 La Jolla Half Marathon, privately I chided myself for being a fraud, having walked a small chunk of it.
Even this past year, I've gotten down on myself when I crashed and burned on a 12-mile training run. An over-riding quest for me in the Carlsbad Half Marathon was to finish it without walking. I wanted to officially run an entire half marathon, making up for my secret "failure" in 1988.
I'm starting to come around, after having read Jeff Galloway's marathon book and Bob Glover's Competitive Runners Handbook. Both extol the virtues and benefits of catching rest periods during a run, and expecially the absolute necessity to slow the pace down on long training runs. Galloway even champions the walk break as the key to successfully completing a marathon. It's taken a while for me to bust through my self-created paradigm and see that even though running provides the bulk of how one gets from start to the finish line, walking a portion (even if done tactically) isn't a failure nor does it render the accomplishment null and void. The objective is to get from A to B as quickly as possible, and if that involves walking, so be it.
This is big revelation for me. I've been so intimidated by the prospect of taking on longer and longer runs, building up to 20+ miles, it's almost derailed me. But with acceptance that walk breaks are not only "allowed" but encouraged, as is a slow "jogging" pace, I'm not so intimidated and find myself looking forward to setting out on new tracks that'll take me far afield from my local haunts. Galloway's walk/run strategy for a marathon actually makes sense and gets me excited to realize that a marathon is actually doable, and I don't have to worry about trying to complete it by running continuously, else I have to mark it a failure.
I commented early in my blogging here about how I'd discovered the joy of running for the first time after all these years. I really have. It's fun to challenge myself and see how my body responds. Running isn't drudgery or boring or a necessary evil. Now, with the collapse of old misconceptions about walking and pacing, I feel like I've broken through to a whole new level of enjoyment possibilities. Now I'm anxious to get through this recovery week and get started on the 18-week path to the Rock 'N Roll Marathon.
