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Training Diary

Wednesday, 12th July 2017

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Wednesday I was all set for the usual which is Crossfit at 5am and Easy Run of 8km. I had decided to get someone else to write my training plan for Melbourne Marathon this time, so that’s a good holding pattern while I’m waiting. Normally I write my plans, but I had been so indecisive with it and just couldn’t pick what I wanted to do, and it’s just so much easier when someone else is telling me what to do. To get to the gym at 5am, I have to get up at 4am. It’s only 15 or 20 minutes down the road, but by the time I get all of my gear together, get dressed and leave a buffer zone for if one of the kids wake up, that’s about the amount of time I need. And just as I was getting to the gym I got a notification that my training plan was ready and it called for 12km, not 8km but I figured I could still squeeze that in after Crossfit. Just.

I love Deadlifts so this was a fun workout for me. I’ve always had trouble getting my knees up very high but there was a huge improvement on that, even towards the end when I was getting tired and grip strength was disappearing into the nether. And although I could almost sense a time in the future where a toes to bar wouldn’t be totally impossible, which was AMAZING.

New distance meant new route. Change is definitely as good as a holiday. And this is a pretty nice reward for a 12km run. And new bridges. I love bridges. There’s probably a metaphor in that somewhere.

As I was running, I was wondering why I hadn’t ever changed my running route before and mostly it’s because it’s one less thing to think about. It’s the same route I used for part of my half marathon down in Ballina, so I’m definitely almost hardwired to run faster there. But at least it helped me get the full 12km in before I headed back home.

 

Sometimes you forget to believe in yourself

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I wrote this in 2017 during a taper, when I had more time to think about things. Somewhere along the line, I’d stopped believing that I could do the really hard things. I’m not sure when it was exactly.

I’m not sure if it was after the Gold Coast in 2014, where I pushed my body to such a red-line effort, that it just refused to let me go back there.

I’m not sure if it was in 2015 in Melbourne where I tried to run under 4 hours and came up 8 minutes short.

Or maybe it was after that when I lost a training partner and I kind of floated for a year or so. It’s hard to say when exactly it was. Or if it was a lot of tiny steps along the way.

Which is funny really, because my literal job is to believe in people. That is the best, most rewarding and most vital part of my job. But it’s easy to give that to other people and it can be hard to give it to yourself. And it’s insidious too, you don’t even notice that you are doing it, or not doing it. Or maybe it’s just easier to let yourself off the hook.

So I had this idea in my head that I could maybe get back to a 1:55 half marathon if I worked really hard, but I could never get under 1:50 again. And as soon as I actually looked at that thought, I knew how weird it was. It’s five minutes. Anyone can improve by five minutes. Maybe it was to protect myself from failure, maybe it was because I just didn’t believe it was worth it to sit in that pain cave again. But there it was.

And it’s the kind of thing that isn’t about the time. It’s not. That belief, that I couldn’t improve, that I couldn’t get better, that I couldn’t achieve things that seemed impossible, that filters down into everything. It’s not the time that’s the problem, it’s the belief that is. The lack of belief wasn’t even overly responsive to logic. I’ve improved my mile time by at least 40 seconds since I ran that fast half at the Gold Coast. Which for a short distance, is a huge amount of time, and still I couldn’t match that objective information with an actual sense of belief.

I settled on the idea that I didn’t have to believe it, I just had to try. I set a pacing strategy based on going under 1:55 which seemed like a pretty aggressive goal for running on my own and with fuel but no water. I left some water in the car just in case I wanted to stop for it, but it was cool and so I decided not to waste the time in the end.

I fuelled up properly beforehand. I took three gels with me. I warmed up properly. I broke up the run into five sections.

1-3km – about 3% slower than goal pace to warm up

4-8km – about 1% slower than goal pace to work into it

9 – 13km goal pace

14 – 18km about 1% faster than goal pace

19 – 21km whatever I had left

The last 5km hurt. But mostly I felt pretty good. I had set up the pace zones as a workout on my watch with Garmin Connect, and so it defaults to just having the watch on that screen so I can’t see the overall time or the average pace. I thought about changing it over at certain points to see how I was going but I didn’t for a couple of reasons. One: I was terrified of accidentally knocking the wrong button and not having a proper recording of all that effort. If it’s not on Strava and all of that. But the second reason was that I knew if I could see the time, I would have taken the easy way out in the last 3km, and I didn’t want to do that. I wanted to know that I could stay and do what was hard, right up until the end.

I was pretty shocked when I saw the time. Only 2 minutes shy of the Gold Coast. And enough to prove to me that I can still do things I don’t even believe I can do.

I don’t know what the answer is. Intuitively, I feel like it is that I do so much better with a training partner (even though those have always been virtual!) because they help to provide me with a context for what I’m doing, to push me to do better, to provide that extra sense of belief when I doubt it.

But for now, I’ll just have to find that for myself.

All the magic is in the work

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View from Warwick Half Marathon, 2016

I was having a conversation the other day about motivation. What happens when you lose your mojo, and you aren’t sure how to get it back. And they said to me, “it’s okay for you, that’s your job”.

Which is totally true. I can’t tell you the amount of times when I’ve thought about not doing something and did it because I am actually accountable for what I do or don’t do. And if I don’t do it, how can I ask anyone else to?I think the last time I didn’t go for a run (other than being sick or injured) was probably in early 2015. So when we were having that chat, I was kind of shocked thinking, because of my work I am actually a professional runner, I’m just a whole lot slower than most other professional runners. And it was kind of cool and kind of shocking all at the same time. It highlighted what a great privilege I have and how I have been underappreciating it.

Right now it is about 11pm and it’s going to be super cold here tomorrow morning when I get up for my run. (At ease people from actually cold places, it’s still cold for here!) I will get to wear long sleeves which has a high degree of novelty and I will enjoy it while I’m out there, but I will really enjoy the hot shower and the coffee when I get home.

And if you asked me why I do it, I don’t really know. I know how it started. It started because I wanted to find out that if I specifically trained and went all in, how would my body respond. I didn’t want any doubt because I was half-hearted in my efforts, or lack lustre in my commitment. I really wanted to know for sure.

That’s when I fell in love with it I think. I love how you have to be willing to invest yourself in it. How you have to be willing to give something of yourself to your training, that you can’t get back.

I have a weird relationship to the end of training cycles. It saddens me when they end. There’s always another, but I love the training process and I don’t always love testing the training process in a race quite as much. I fear that the race might not be what the training has deserved. It feels like an ending and it’s often a reluctant one.

This is a bit of a training diary from the weekend after my long run:

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On Mother’s Day, the kids got me a little Flash superhero figurine. He’s my favourite superhero because he’s a scientist, not just someone with superpowers. That’s my approach to running. Gifts are awesome. Speed is amazing. But all the magic is in the science and in the work.

So in 4 days, I get to go and find out what my work looks like. I’m looking forward to finding out.

“If I’m going to sing like someone else, then I don’t need to sing at all.” ~Billie Holiday

When it’s time to stop saying nothing

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A long while ago, towards the end of my blogging life I just posted photos. It seemed like there was more truth in an image, because words could be interpreted every which-way and end up so far from where you intended them to. But an image, was pure in a final kind of way.

I still do that. Post pictures without words. It’s true because it’s enigmatic and without meaning and it can be interpreted in a million different ways but those interpretations never change the original creative work, it just stands as it is.

Sometimes when you have everything to say, it’s easy to say nothing. And after awhile it becomes impossible to say anything at all. I’ve been talking plenty on the podcast, but I haven’t really written anything in awhile.

Some people will remember this, but back in 2012 I had a severe clinical depressive episode that bordered on psychosis. I don’t really remember much about it, but I do remember not sleeping, like ever. I could sleep for maybe only five minutes at a time and even that was more like dozing than actual sleep. It’s hard to explain what a month of that will do to you.

The brain is broken, and it can’t fix itself. It knows enough to try, but it’s broken so there’s a never-ending loop. A friend of mine on Twitter said to me ‘just daydream’ when I couldn’t sleep. And I did, and it made it easier. And sometimes still when I stare back into the old abyss, I drift still to cope.

I would like to tell the story that it goes away and it never comes back and it makes you stronger somehow, but it doesn’t really it just sensitises you to how vulnerable you are at any given moment. How easy it is to find yourself somewhere that you can’t come back from. And how sometimes it’s easier to be alone with your disease than not.

I haven’t been back there since, but I now know I could and sometimes you feel the edges of it, creeping in. And I’ve felt the edges. And then I’ve been good. And then I’ve touched the edges again.

And I don’t write anything about that for two reasons. One because it’s my normal. And two, because I like the version of myself where I’m a positive person and a person who just gets things done that need to get done a whole lot better. But the not writing it, leaves me with nothing to say about anything else. I get stuck pretty easily there.

Sometimes it’s hard to know where I end and Operation Move begins. And sometimes I find myself holding back for fear of polluting it with my own many imperfections. Which sounds silly, but it’s my nature. To protect things that matter at all costs, even if that cost is a little bit of myself along the way.

I worry about how my current weight loss reflects on the values of body positivity.

I worry when I’m going for an aggressive time goal, if I’m sacrificing inclusion.

I worry that I’m just not good enough to do it justice.

One thing I know for sure though is that fear is okay, but paralysis never did anyone any favours. And being disappointing is still better than being nothing.

Would you keep going if you were never going to improve?

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You know that thing that they say? “You get out what you put in”? Well it’s true, and I’ve said it plenty of times myself, but like most things it’s also not true as well. Have you heard about fitness non-responders? Well it turns out some people are ‘high responders’, some people are ‘moderate responders’ and some people are so called ‘non-responders’. All that means is that if you apply a fitness stimulus (running, biking, rowing or whatever is your exercise of choice) the fitness adaptations people will make will vary greatly. Have you ever noticed how that mate of yours who you started running with got a whole lot faster, a whole lot quicker and wondered why? They are probably a high responder. The idea of the non-responder is something that has been a bit controversial, because logically it just doesn’t seem possible that there is absolutely no change. And a recent study suggests that they aren’t non-responders they just have to work harder than everyone else.

That’s something I know a bit about. I’ve suspected with running I tend to be a bit of a low responder. It takes big hikes in volume and intensity before I see improvements. And because I’m hypermobile, I’ve known that getting stronger is a whole lot harder. Hypermobility isn’t nearly as fun as it sounds and it doesn’t mean you (necessarily) have super stretchy muscles either. What it means is that muscles are tight and ligaments are lax. As a result, movement mechanics are usually not great and it’s really hard to get into stable positioning. So you fatigue more, gaining strength is harder and improvements happen but it’s at snails pace.

And sometimes you know something because you just accept it, but then when it’s spelled out to you it kind of takes you by surprise anyway. I was listening to a podcast with a strength and conditioning coach the other day and he was mentioning things that are almost impossible to deal with in terms of improvements and one of them was hypermobility. It’s not fixable. You don’t really improve. It’s super challenging and any improvements that you do have are hard won and slow. His example was a client of his he had coached for three years and she had maybe added 20kg to her deadlift in those three years. Which sounded pretty familiar. Reality can be a slap in the face like that.

After I was done feeling sorry for myself, it got me to thinking though – if I knew I was never going to improve would I do anything differently? Or if I could improve, but it would take more time and more work would it still be worth it? Is it frustrating to feel like a lost cause? Of course it is. But that’s just where the story starts.