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Off the leash!

January 17, 2019 (Night)

Exercise Type: Run

Comments:
Joined up with the Tito running club for the first time since December. The name is an acronym for "Trchanje i to" meaning "Running and other stuff" but it also corresponds to the name of beloved Yugoslav dictator Marshall Tito. I message Nudzejma ("Nu-jay-ma"), the organizer of the club, earlier in the day to see she had planned and she said they were doing a tempo run which sounded good to me. Their pace is always too slow for me but I figured if they were doing a tempo then I could at least enjoy a comfortable pace with the top group without having to slow down. It turned out to be just me and one other guy, Adam, in the top group, but fortunately, he was in solid shape and didn't take any breaks. I did keep having to reign my pace in but when I finally turned on Strava and looked at how fast I was going I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was around 7:30. I guess I'm not so slow after all! When I'm running alone this pace probably feels fast to me and takes and effort, but when I'm with someone else who wants to go this pace (or slow) my body is antsing to break freeeeeee!

And break free I did! With 8 minutes to go, Adam told me to go ahead without him for the last part of the run (or at least I think that's what he said... I'd been trying to practice my Bosnian with him earlier in the run, but this interaction invovled a lot of vocab words I didn't recognize). In any case, I immediately dropped the pace by about a minute, feeling like a dog let off its leash. It felt so good to just run the way my body wanted! And what my body wanted, according to Strava, was a 6:30-6:50 pace. Not bad! Especially given that I'd done a challenging run the day before ( and the day before that as well). I finished feeling happier than I have after a run all week.

One more oddity: the entire run was back and forth along the Wilson Promenade, the flat, closed-to-cars street that runs for 1.1 miles along the Miljacka River just past downtown. This is normally the sort of run I hate - the same thing over and over with no variety. But on this night, I somehow fell into a lull where I wasn't counting how many time's I'd run this stretch or worrying even about how many blocks I had till the next turn around. I wasn't having many conversations, but having someone to run with made all the difference. It allowed me to be lost in my own thoughts without having to worry that being distracted would cause me to slow down (as it had last night). I definitely need to do this more often.

Afterwards a bunch of us went out for coffee in the mall next door as we often do. I ordered a hot chocolate which in Bosnia is a cross behind hot cocoa and hot pudding (delish!) and chatting with Nudzejma, her husband Jasmin, the British athletic trainer Nick, Vedran, and a few others I met that night. Nudzejma and I were talking about the half-marathon we're running the Croatian city of Split next month on the Adriatic Coast and she told me it was a really beautiful city and that I was really going to like it. I asked her if her family often went to that area growing up and she said, rather matter-a-factly without much emotion, that her family had spent a good part of her childhood livings refugees in Croatia after her father was killed at the start of the war, that after the war they'd returned to another part of Bosnia where they were poor and didn't have much chance for vacation, but that finally when she came to Sarajevo for school she started having those opportunities again. That's Bosnia, in a nutshell. So many people have stories like this, with murder and grief and ethnic cleansing lurking just below the surface. It's been 25 years and some people like Nudzejma can mention it in a conversation rather casually and them move on to talking about running the Berlin Marathon this fall. But there truly is no 100% escaping my research topic here, even when going on a run.

For those of you looking to put off that AP Psych homework a little longer, here's a trailer for film being made about Nudzejma. Read the description below it first: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/little-star-rising