Well last week’s lesson was “if you’re chuffed with what you’ve done, blog quickly before you have chance to devalue it and turn it into a negative”. Putting that lesson into practice, I’m quite pleased with yesterday’s run – upping my time from 1hr 20 to 1hr 30, which translated into 7.8ish miles. Once again it was a bit on the undulating side – I’m learning that that there’s no escaping hills round here, it’s not quite Wales, but we have plenty of mini valleys.
One new idea I have adopted/adapted was from Runners World (I buy it occasionally to feel like I’m a real runner…) – 101 Best Tips Ever in the August issue.
Number 33, from Joe Beer (author of Need to Know Triathlon)
‘Set “failure”, “adequate”, “success” and “dream” goals for all your races. This means you have an exact benchmark with which to rate your efforts rather than how you got on compared with someone else – or worse still, lowering a goal after a race to ensure you succeeded’.
Now, there’s not much chance of the latter; I’m much more likely to be disappointed that I didn’t achieve a goal that I didn’t actually set before I went out (didn’t go far/fast/long enough, even though I did the time/distance that I intended to).
So for me, setting these graded goals means that I can try to move away from my ‘all or nothing’ thinking – my success goal yesterday had 2 built in recovery walks of 30 seconds (see above to see if you can guess where they were). I was thinking about some arcane knowledge I picked up somewhere along the way which says that you should try to increase your distance by 10% each week. Technically this would have taken me up to 1hr 28, which I felt was perfectly acceptable, so even with my minute’s walk I ran for 1hr 29. And then added an extra minute at the end to round things up…
PS. Graceless plodding aside, I’m continuing in my spirit of Juneathon to try something new tomorrow. Anyone for racketball?
Travelling Hopefully 