Wednesday, August 14, 2013

Suck It, Barter Hill.

I'll admit, I have been feeling pretty cocky about my marathon training. The shorter distances and slower paces have been pretty easy. Heck, even the 10 mile run last Saturday wasn't too bad.

But today was different. I was a few minutes into my warm-up mile and I already felt like it was going to be a bad run. At the mile mark, I increased my pace to 10:09 per mile. And less than a half mile later, I hit Barter Hill.
This doesn't feel good today. You could do the miles, instead.
You're just hungry from not eating breakfast. You should run the miles after work.
So what if you blow off one training run? You're still running twelve miles Saturday.
See? Barter Hill. It's where I start making deals with myself to do anything except complete the task at hand.  It starts with a kernel of self-doubt and builds to a full-blown attack on my confidence and determination.

Unless...

I dig deep, tell myself there is no way around the task except to finish it, and I keep going. That's what happened today. I shook off the "stop" attitude, turned the music up a bit louder, and fought to find a running rhythm. At the end of my scheduled five mile run, I felt powerful and successful.

It doesn't always work. Sometimes, the voices of doubt get too loud and I cave. When that happens, I feel like crap emotionally long after any physical soreness would have faded. And that's my lesson, the big take-away.

Don't let temporary weakness (physical or mental) become more than it is. Push back and fight back. The victory at the end is that much sweeter knowing how much you worked for it.

Confidence, like sweat, is very sexy.

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