Listen to your body

Have you ever really listened to your body? Have you woken up and felt like your body was trying to tell you something? Like after a stressful week and a hard workout that it needed more rest. Do you ever have days when you feel like you needed more protein? 

Do you ever listen to your body? 

As runners, we really need to take time to get to know our body and listen to what it needs. If we want to stay running for years and feel good while running, it is so important to develop body awareness. We need to know when we are thirsty, hungry, tired, or on the verge of developing an injury. I find it so useful to take time to understand how my body feels and what my body needs. If I am craving more protein, what does it correlate with? Have I been pushing my workouts harder? Have I increased my mileage recently? Is my period coming? Am I more stressed out than normal? What is going on in my whole life outside of my workouts? Our bodies are really smart. My body is usually right when it tells me it needs something. So I listen.

Throughout my life, I have worked on understanding in order to know what my body feels like when it is healthy. There is so much advice out there in the world on how to take care of our bodies. I feel that everyone has a unique way of feeling their best and healthiest. What one body needs another body might not need. Humans are complex. Our diversity in genetics creates a diversity in metabolisms, nutritional needs, and rest needs. 

If you are new to listening to your body as a runner, you may find it helpful to journal (about) how you feel after a run. Just a quick 5-10 minutes to write down how your run felt. Did the workout feel hard or easy? Did your body feel heavy and sluggish or light and strong? What did you eat and drink that day? What did you eat and drink the day before? Have you been getting enough sleep? Keeping a daily journal of your nutrition, hydration, and sleep schedule can help you see patterns in how you feel. If you go back and read through your journal, you should be able to see patterns with how you felt during and post workout. This can help you learn to listen to your body.   

I take this listening out on the trail with me. I tune into my body to keep my body running in an efficient way. I listen to my thirst. I listen to my muscles. I listen to my breathe. I listen to my heart.