As the oppressive heat of the southern summer descends upon us, it’s time to embrace the slowdown that comes with the rising mercury. No Service Summer is about embracing the adventurous side of running. This is a time to worry about where we’re going to swim after the run, not our splits or how much vert we logged.
Most of us, I’m looking at you Matt Johnson, have fully embraced the technological advances that have come along in running over the last decade or so. We run with GPS watches, we’re on Strava, and we use all manner of websites to do our route planning. These aren’t bad things by any stretch. They’ve certainly improved our enjoyment of the sport. Some of us came together through Strava, so we’re in no way decrying running tech. We’ll still be putting our runs to Strava and making sure we snap a few photos for IG, but this summer we’re okay if it takes us a little while to get enough bars for our runs to upload.
While these technological gizmos and gadgets are great, it can be all too easy to get caught up in them. Constantly measuring yourself against Strava segments or race results. It’s important to take a breather from that every now and again to remember why we love this sport. Sure we all love setting PRs and accomplishing goals, but those aren’t always easy to come by and if you focus only on results, you’re going to find this much less enjoyable. No Service Summer is about the process. It’s about our relationship with running. It’s finding our why.
This might make it sounds like we have these epic summer runs planned and sure we’ve got some weekends circled and some missions in mind, but you sense this as a vibe or an attitude you can take it with you wherever you run. One day it might be an early wake-up to hit some dirt roads up in the mountains but it’ll also be the everyday runs because it’s all about the approach. No Service Summer is all “I get to run today” and no “I have to run today”.
Regardless of what you’ve got planned this summer when it comes to running, we invite you to join in on No Service Summer and enjoy the heck out of it.
Certified Rollers 