Archives for March 2016

Overtraining and Outrunning Your Joy

Zoey · March 22, 2016 ·

A couple of years ago, in preparation for Melbourne, I sought out a running coach, I was over-trained and I ended up losing some love for running. Over-training is so easy to do, especially for women runners. I was running 5-6 times a week, which isn’t unusual for me, but to accommodate it I had to give up cross-training and although I had a great result in Melbourne, towards the end I dreaded training runs.

Funnily enough, after writing a post yesterday about comparison (even to myself), this morning in my timehop was this photo.

That was just at the beginning of Gold Coast Marathon training (even though I didn’t end up running because I got injured). And a whole heap faster than I am now. And there are lots of reasons for that. But the main one is probably that (unfortunately) you can’t really stay at peak fitness for very long, eventually you have to rebuild. But it’s also not overly important. It was one point in time, and this is another point in time. And I’m still recovering from that over-training. Physically I’m fine, although I still have a few niggles from my injury so I keep tabs on that pretty closely. But I think the worst part about over-training isn’t the physical toll, it’s the mental one.

When you do too much, any type of run becomes tedious. You lose your love for it. You dread the long stretches of time on long runs and you dread the demands of speed on your short ones. And then one day you remember that you are supposed to be doing this for fun. And it’s a great reminder that finding a running coach that suits you is a bit like finding a partner – you have to try things on and see how they fit and be willing to adjust when they don’t.

Holding that joy close to your chest in times of recovery or boredom or tediousness or difficulty is so vitally important. Because you can’t measure joy in distance travelled or pace or any other number. So I hold on to that joy, even when it’s hard to remember.

Conversations with my daughter

Zoey · March 21, 2016 ·

I have an ongoing conversation with my daughter at the moment, because everything is a comparison. I suspect it’s a combination of age and personality, but still we have the conversation.

Fair doesn’t mean equal.

What someone else has, doesn’t devalue what you have.

If you always compare what you have, to what other people have, you will always be disappointed.

Don’t let what someone else has, change how you see what you have.

It’s a good reminder for me too. I never thought of myself as an optimist, but having this conversation several times a day, I’m turning into one.

You hear people say that you should only compare yourself to yourself. I don’t even do that anymore. I’m just where I’m at right now. I judge things based on effort. Did I show up? Did I give it all I had on that day? Will I show up tomorrow? Those are the only questions worth asking.

You know the answer, you just don’t like it

Zoey · March 14, 2016 ·

Anyone who’s been part of Operation Move for awhile has probably heard me say this before. But I don’t really believe in indecision. I believe that the vast majority of the time the indecision is because deep down we know the answer, we just don’t like it or don’t want it to be true.

It takes awhile to know something to be true and a while longer to accept it.

So I was out on my long run on Sunday, delaying the inevitable. It was a nice place to be. A bit of rain, a lot of rainbows and a lot of time. I’ve changed my long runs to podcast listening time, rather than music listening time and I’m really enjoying it. I kind of get more than just my own company out there. Even more than that, I get great ideas on long runs so having something that stimulates that is a great thing. So there I was listening to Seth Godin tell me about if I wanted a real business I need to hire people who are better than me to do my job, so I can do my real job which is to innovate. And with the awesome group of coaches I have at the moment, I know I’m well on track there.

This year, even though now both my kids are at school I knew time was going to be a big ask. I want to be able to do family things and propel the business forward and devote enough time to study and do my own training as well, but the truth is I can’t. There just aren’t enough hours in the day and I need to focus on what is important. There’s pretty much only one thing that’s flexible in that list – and that’s training time. I love marathon training and as far as my plan goes in the scheme of marathon training it’s a pretty light training load – but it’s still more than I can handle right now. And I don’t mean to alarm you, but Melbourne Marathon is in the middle of my exam week. I don’t think that they can run exams on a Sunday, can they?

Maidenwell might be my last marathon for awhile. I’ll be returning to short distance training and I’ll still be going to all of the races I planned to go to this year, I just won’t be running very far. I will miss my long runs, especially as it gets cooler and it is perfect weather for running. I’ve turned my schedule over a thousand ways and even though I know I could make the actual time work, it just makes life harder than it needs to be. It’s not so much the time as the recovery time too, where I actually need my brain to be functioning.

It wasn’t that long ago that I was running six days a week and now it’s probably going to be three which might be a bit of an adjustment. But I think it will be a fun one too. One of the coaches asked me at Crossfit today what my strict press PB was and I laughed and said it depends on how much I’m running, because as soon as you add in long distance running you lose strength. So instead of bemoaning the loss of my beloved long run, I think I’ll use the opportunity to find out how strong I could get instead. parkrun starts in Lismore in a month and that seems like perfect timing to me.

Training has to give you more than it takes and right now it’s taking a bit too much.

Running and Developing Mental Toughness

Zoey · March 2, 2016 · Leave a Comment

I think anyone who starts running knows that the biggest battle is with your head. It’s a never-ending argument between the part of your brain that wants you to stop, and the part of your brain that wants you to keep going. So much of what we do achieve or don’t achieve is mental. Yes, you need to have some kind of a training base to get you into the position to take on those challenges but once you have a base, you can do far more than you think you can.

In the beginning, the best way to develop that strength within yourself is to always go for a run, when you say you are going to go. Don’t leave that decision to ‘see how you feel’ on the morning. Decide how many times you are going to go every week, on what times and on what days and do that. If you need to move things around, do that. And only cancel if you are sick, injured or have some kind of unforeseen emergency. You will try to talk yourself out of it, and you can notice that conversation but you can’t pay any attention to it. You can play around with that too. I used to do a thing where if I almost gave in to that conversation about not wanting to go, I’d add 20% on to the end of the distance, just to prove to myself that I could.

The next step is to recognise that things that are good for you, won’t necessarily feel very good at the time. I hate cleaning the house. I LOATHE IT. But there is no better feeling of happiness or accomplishment than when it’s done. Stop thinking about you right now and start thinking about future you – what are you going to do for your future self to help them feel happy, accomplished and healthy? Step away from immediate gratification land and start making choices that are going to benefit your future self. I find it really helpful to have a coach for this reason. Although I’d be quite capable of writing my own training plan, I’m far more likely to do something and not question it – if it’s set down by someone else. I can know that my coach is looking after what is good for my body and then go and do it. If I’m guiding my own training, it’s too easy for me to talk myself out of it, or choose a workout that isn’t quite so hard.

Understand that a huge part of the benefit of really hard workouts is not how fast you go or PBs you set but it’s your ability to push through when you think you’ve got nothing left. High intensity workouts or intervals do amazing things for you strength, respiratory system and fitness but that’s not where I think the biggest benefit lies. I think the biggest benefit is in teaching yourself that you can keep going, that you can do hard things and that you won’t give up. It’s those workouts that you completed that will keep you going when you are at the tail end of a race and you are struggling – because you know you can gut pretty much anything out if you need to. Because you know that if you keep going, eventually you’ll get to the end.

I’ve never regretted a run, have you? I think that’s what it comes down to. Sometimes runs are good, sometimes they are great, sometimes they are even transcendent but sometimes they are awful, hard, or a struggle when they have no right to be. But at the end, I’d rather have the achievement from having done them, than not.

The more you exercise mental toughness, the more you have of it. I don’t even really think about whether I’m going for a run or not anymore. I might wake up and not feel like it, but I’m kind of on auto-pilot. A bit like having a shower or brushing my teeth – I just do it. That is about five years of exercising my choice to run. After awhile it becomes second nature. I was reading this thing about how our thought processes literally change our brain. So if I regularly face a choice or running or not running, if I choose running – that connection in my brain will move closer together, so quite literally each time I choose running it makes my future choice or running more likely. You can read more about that here.

Conversely, it has been shown that the more decisions you have to make the less will power you have. So starting a new habit is all about removing the decisions you have to make – from when you are going to go to what you are going to wear to what the session is.

There are no limits. You just have to decide to start and then show up, no matter what.

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