Running Program – Mind Games
In any long-term running program it is inevitable that there will be days where you will simply not want to do the scheduled run. Today was such a day for me.
It was the day of my weekly long run, and I awoke early to do a pre-breakfast run. I was dressed and rearing to go when my son awoke crying from a nightmare. No amount of comforting would get him back to sleep, so reluctantly I got changed and sat down with him to eat breakfast and watch TV for a while.
I don’t know exactly why, but when it came to restarting the run a couple of hours later, I just didn’t feel as ready as I had done first thing in the morning. I had a bit of a tickle in the throat, so maybe I was coming down with a cold? Maybe my breakfast hadn’t settled? Who knows. I put it to the back of my mind and began the run.
I had planned to do nine miles at recovery pace. The run was going fine at the half-mile mark, but by the end of the first mile I believed that I was some twenty seconds or more behind my previous time! I was convinced that I had slowed down at a much faster rate than normal. Damn – I must be coming down with a cold! I thought. During the second mile I was debating the wisdom of running the full nine miles. Potentially it could weaken my immune system and make me more likely to come down with a much worse cold. At this point I decided to see how I felt at the end of four miles. If I still felt under-the-weather I would call it a day.
Over the next couple of miles my mind was wavering. Although I believed I was slower, I actually didn’t feel as bad as I had earlier in the run. At the fourth mile, I wasn’t quite sure, but I seemed to be maintaining a reasonable pace and perhaps was making up a bit of time? OK then, let’s see how I feel at six miles.
I was feeling more comfortable, if a little tired as I was approaching six miles. If I was slower than usual, it certainly wasn’t by much. It would be a shame to miss out on a reasonable length run, so I would carry on until seven miles and finish there, only two miles short of my planned distance. This would mean that I would not have to change my schedule for future runs.
My pace was maintained comfortably throughout the seventh mile. If anything, I was feeling better now than at any point earlier in the run. Great! Another mile would mean that I had barely changed my scheduled run. So I continued. In fact, I continued past the eight mile mark. I only had another mile to go to complete the scheduled distance, and it no longer mattered if it was slower than hoped. To run nine miles in the future I would have to start all over again, whereas now I was less than a mile away from the distance. It would be pointless to stop.
So in the end I completed my original target distance. What’s more, I subsequently discovered that I had in fact been running slightly faster than in previous recovery runs! In hindsight, I think I was confusing my progress with a faster Tempo run, and not a recovery run. All the negative feelings were in my head. I would have been kicking myself all week had I abandoned that run.
This was a reminder to me that some of my best runs have happened on days when I least felt like running. Also, I often find that the first mile or so can feel worse than the subsequent miles. Thus, it is not a good idea to make any decisions about abandoning a run until around the two mile mark. If the idea of a long run feels dreadful, then the promise that I’ll stop once I’ve reached a shorter goal can be enough to keep me going. It’s a simple mind game, but it works.
The most important thing is to get started. It is easy to miss a training run if I don’t even bother getting changed into my running clothes. Once the run is under way, it then becomes harder to abandon it than to carry on.
You can find articles about training with a heart rate monitor at the Women’s Heart Rate Monitor training blog, where you can also follow my progress as I put the principles into action.
October 20 2009 05:16 am | Running Program
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