I’m just going straight into a blog post from my morning journaling and writing because I started off writing today about letting things be easy and going with the flow and resisting this comparisonitis sort of thing, and by the end of my writing (I try to write 1,667 words every day, which should equate to a 50,000 word “book” per month – they’re not actually books and more just an extension of my journaling, at least at the moment, but I find it a good discipline that helps me to process my thoughts and just practise writing). Anyway, by the end of my rant I was just full on getting annoyed about someone online who used to be a worse runner than me and has now blown right past me! So fully comparing and getting kind of annoyed, and reachy and greedy about my own running.
So I just sort of wanted to deal with that thought that had obviously been brewing under the surface even though I thought I was feeling pretty happy about my running at the moment. Because I think this is what I do. I maybe run a relatively ok time, for where I am, in some race or parkrun. And initially, I’m over the moon about it. Then, I decide I want to improve on it. Then, I start obsessing about what I’m going to do to improve. Then, I start planning lots of complicated training. Then, I get overambitious, impatient, reachy. Then I fail at the first hurdle and get discouraged and kind of just give up. Or, I might push myself too hard and get either ill or burnt out or even injured.
So I’d really like to avoid falling into that trap this time around and right now I’m still in the final preparations for an ultra in just over two weeks. So I can’t do a great deal of damage in terms of running right now, but because of that, and because I’m kind of tired from the extra mileage, I’ve been consuming a lot of running content, mostly on YouTube, and obsessing about how I’m going to get faster after the ultra.
I ran a pretty good four-mile race a couple of days ago. I did it as a progression run and I was very pleased. But of course now I’m thinking that it wasn’t really very fast and how do I get faster. How do I improve my 10k and 5k times as WELL as the half marathon time I was supposedly going to focus on for the rest of the year?
Which is what I always do. But also what I do is I push too hard to go from here to there. I look at where I am right now, and the gap between that and maybe my season’s best or my best time from last year, and I try to jump straight to there because it’s maybe not that exciting to me to just equal what I have done already. I get greedy and I want even better than that. But it’s not realistic and it’s trying to run before I can walk. And ultimately it’s just demoralising and unproductive.
It would be so much better if I could train myself effectively from where I AM. And see progress. Rather than pushing too hard and getting only inconsistent progress, if any. And this is where the comparisonitis is SO damaging. Because I have to say these YouTubers can be a bit frustrating in terms of choosing quite emotional and flashy titles, and highlighting the improvements they make, that often actually seem to come from nowhere! They don’t really say very much about the bad runs and also, because it’s easy to consume months of content in a day or two, you can end up with the impression that someone is improving much more quickly than they really are.
I need to have more patience. I have a tendency to treat every single parkrun as a race or PB attempt, and then get frustrated when I don’t run really well every single week. More serious runners wouldn’t dream of going and doing a parkrun at full effort every week. They tend to be much more patient. It’s not my strong point!
It starts in the mind. Firstly, it’s just running and it doesn’t really matter what time you do. It’s more important that you just ENJOY it. I do honestly believe that. Running is so incredibly good for you and running consistently and with a club has completely changed my life, regardless of times and PBs. But, on the other hand, I do love the idea of training properly. I like seeing improvement and I like working hard, and getting fitter feels really good. I don’t want to waste my time doing the wrong things and just going round in circles never getting anywhere.
The first thing is that having a strong base of aerobic training is essential. So the first thing to remember is to ensure that I’m doing enough easy miles each week before I look at anything else. I think the second thing for me to do is to really try to be up for my speed workouts, and plan beforehand how I’m going to approach them, in terms of pace, and also make sure I warm up properly, so if I don’t feel fully warmed up at the start of a session (which I don’t have complete control over as it’s a group thing and there’s sometimes quite a bit of standing around before the start), just let myself ease into the first few reps. Don’t OVERdo things, and having a pacing plan beforehand will help with that. I don’t have to compete. I don’t have to be exhausted on the floor at the end of every or any session. Think of stacking good week upon good week and not knackering myself in one session and then having to take things completely easy for weeks to make up for it. And then, with parkruns and little races, use progression/goal pace running. Practise pacing. And again, it doesn’t have to be an all-out effort every time I race or run parkrun. Finally, hopefully add some half marathon goal pace running into the long runs, but I’ll probably wait and see how things go after the ultra before I decide whether that’s appropriate, or whether I have time to fit it in.
Ease and flow. No rush. I think out of all of that probably the most important thing to remember is the importance of stacking several consistent weeks of training on top of each other, and for me that means holding myself back slightly and keeping that intensity a little bit lower to ensure I recover well enough to do my next planned session or even just enough easy miles each week.
So, I’m still clearly completely obsessed with running. I could try to reapply these ideas to other topics but I think this post is long enough already. So I’ll leave it there for now.