Excerpt from Alia Gray’s blog post “Playing Running”:

In a training regime where more days are intensely structured than not, a week of just running was cathartic, a total mental relaxation. When I felt like running faster, I’d run faster. If I was feeling sluggish, I’d ease up. I never pushed, but I also didn’t hold my legs back from stretching out and enjoying some turnover if that’s what they felt like doing. I played.

For a sport so simplistic in nature, it’s easy to get enveloped in the complications of and depth of training. Specific paces, altitude adjustments, weight of various training shoes, sleeping and eating schedules…these are all vital components of training. With all of that, it can be too easy to loose sight of the fact that running at it’s most basic is a gift of instinct bestowed on all healthy human beings.

Read the entire post here