A fifty-percent deficiency is all relative. In airplane engines, it is a really bad thing. In kidneys, not too bad. In tires? The problem is you only have one spare, and it's miniature. What happens when two tires go out at once? If you don't have AAA or an equivalent, you end up driving on whatever tire is the least flat.
While TJ stood guard (you're pretty vulnerable when changing a spare, even if it is in a mall parking lot), I replaced the right rear tire, tossed the bad one in the trunk, and hoped the front right tire could take us home. It could.
The next day my neighborhood auto mechanic had one tire plugged and the other replaced by 10:30 AM. All-in-all, it could have been much worse. It reminded me that situations like this can happen at any time. You need a Plan B, or maybe even C.
Like most runners, I've had the occasional race where the wheels just fell off. As you creep toward the finish, you wonder what went wrong. The most common problem is that you expected everything to go right. Running, like most things in life, requires constant adjustments.
The adjustments range from monitoring how you feel on race day or before a key workout, to changes you make as you age. You might make back off a little at the start of a race to let yourself work into your pace, or maybe you drop a day per week of running from your schedule so you can recover fully. You might add speedwork to jump-start your energy system, but subtract some mileage to keep your overall work level in check. The adjustments are constant, with unforgiving consequences if you try to simply stay the course. Hmm... somehow this veered into commentary about the economy.
In ChiRunning we teach that you need to feel what is going on in your body in order to make changes to your form and posture. A constant process of sensing make the adjustments easier to make. We things are off, it is off because we are paying attention.
My mechanic told me there were nails in both tires. Since I don't live or work in a construction zone, I'm not sure sure where I picked-up those unwelcome travelers. You can't avoid every problem: sometimes you drive over nails. But you can adjust, and soon you'll be back on the road again. And with proper adjustments, you can keep driving, or running, for a long time.
Five ways to make adjustments:
- Check in regularly so you know what your baseline is.
- Make the check-in be comparative, not judgemental. "I feel bad," is not as helpful as "I feel tighter than yesterday."
- Don't make too many changes at once. No more than two per week.
- Learn to trust your gut. Don't let ego arguments carry the day.
- Set some boundaries. Healthy running does not involve limping!
