On my more lucid days, when I’ve taken my meds, I always find that if I back off and jog or even walk home, my body rewards me with wonderful feelings of “rightness.” Hard to explain, but there’s a very clear sense of happiness that comes with doing the right thing. I’ve made that feeling, to a very large extent, the key to my training.

Now, of course it’s subjective. But there are two kinds of inner feeling: one is emotional and unreliable, influence by personal wants; but the other is calmly impersonal. In other words, I know I’m in the right kind of feeling when I have no personal stake in what it’s telling me. I’m not trying to override it and pretend it’s telling me something it’s not. I’m absolutely committed to doing what it says. Call it a kind of “reasonable feeling.” In fact, I find my training goes best when I hold feeling and reason in a calm, clear balance. Not always easy, but I’ve found it to be quite reliable.

Lydiard never said that you should be able to do the same workout over again. What about a 21-mile run over tough hills? What he said is that a runner should finish each outing feeling “pleasantly tired.” In other words, with a reserve of energy that the body can use to start recovering, adapting, growing stronger. That would be a smaller reserve than might allow us to repeat, say, a 15-mile midweek run as included in Lydiard’s ideal schedule.

I’m amazed how, after 40 years of running, I still feel at the start of every run that I must assume nothing, but run as if this run is a unique experiment that I must monitor carefully. Each run is, in fact, unique. My point, in the book and these articles, is that the body will tell us what it can safely and efficiently do, if we listen for its signals. And the best way I’ve found to “listen to the body” is by cultivating a certain calm, impersonal, unexcited inner feeling, with focused attention, persistence, and determination to follow the advice I get. It’s a discipline, but I find that if I submit to it, the rewards are always wonderful.