It's your biorhythms, stupid

In the seven years that I've been at this crazy sport, I have learned a lot. I won't bore myself (or you) with a summary of it all, but I will say that one thing that has largely escaped my learning is being able to figure out why some days I have 'good' runs and some days I have 'bad' runs. Of course, there are some factors that I know will contribute to a bad running day. For example, if I eat a lot of sugar and junk the day before, my legs - especially my calves - feel really tight and painful the next day. I don't really know why... I've chalked it up to some form of mild, temporary gout or something like that.... in my mind... all the sugar and junk trickles down to my calves and makes the muscles sticky. Makes sense, right?

But for the most part, I can't figure out why some days I feel great and other days not so much. I haven't found any consistent correlation with sleep, hydration, time of day, etc. Anyway... today was a good day and that is something to be happy about. I was on the treddy this morning and did the first warm-up mile at my usual warm-up pace (8:40), but as I starting increasing the mph's I found that my legs, heart, and lungs were responding really well. I felt great and as a result, kept the pace under 8:10, which for me is a bit faster than usual... and I probably could have even ramped it up beyond that. Cool. Of course, I'm not naive enough to totally trust it... I'm sure it's an anomaly and I'll be back to huffing and puffing to maintain an 8:20 pace sometime soon. But that's fine... it was nice to have a good day today.

In trying to figger out why today, Seebo suggested that perhaps it was related to my biorhythms. I had heard the term before, but was not familiar with what it really meant. Apparently, this was big in the 70s when I was like three. So, of course, I Googled it.... and wouldn't you know.... looks like today is right about at my 'peak' in terms of my physical cycle... which, of course, relates to my "strength, health, and raw physical vitality".



Who knows, maybe I'll start planning my race calendar to coincide with the peaks in my biorhythm cycles.

6 miles in 49:08