Imagine you are in the wild, running for whatever reason (not for your life) until you are exhausted and can’t move. Then a wild animal appears. Suddenly you are able to run faster than before. The exhaustion you felt before was actually your brain slowing you down to not kill yourself in your run and to have something else in the tank.

How much we can use or leave in the tank is determined by our brain, so we can train it and teach it in different ways to be able to access most of that fuel when necessary, and not only when chased by a lion but ideally when racing the best of the best. Matt Fitzgerald, in his great book How Bad You Want It? talks about all of us having a wall, but we can’t reach it as we need to walk in burning coal to get closer and closer. We can train how close to the wall we get, but not touching our wall/limit.

That’s mental strength. And we can all train it. There are many ways, but for this post we will reduce it to this: we have to do hard things to be able to do hard things. You need to be stubborn with your inner voice telling you to stop, to go slower. You need to continue independent of the pain. Said in the words of a champion, you need to…

The other side of this coin is that there is a reason your brain is telling you to stop, and you need to identify if it’s just exhaustion or something else. You can confuse the usual muscle pain with an nascent injury. You can ignore that little pain in your feet because you are a badass, only to find out that your plantar fasciitis has increased and now you have to be one month without running.

Knowing when to back off might be the difference between cutting one training session short and spending half your season in rehab. Now it makes more sense not pushing it so hard.

So, what should we do?

We need to be mindful of our body, and how the body feels. This is very hard because we need to feel and understand what we are feeling in the session. For this, we need to know our bodies and read its feedback and the feeling of going at different intensities to identify when something is wrong.

Unfortunately, today we are everyday less into hearing our body. We plug our headphones, and don’t listen to our feet touching the ground and our cadence. If we don’t check our HRM or watch we won’t have a clue of effort or speed, thus making it hard to actually train in the effort zone prescribed as we wont have a clue of how it actually feels. Our highly cushioned shoes prevent us from feeling if we are running correctly or not, thus we don’t have the feedback to prevent bad running form to becoming a habit.

My recommendation here is as general as it can be. Allow yourself to learn how to listen to your body and learn to push hard when you need to push hard, and realize you need to back off when necessary, before its to late. Listen to your body, get that feedback.

Go running or walking barefoot in the grass, run without headphones only listening to the sound of your shoes impacting the ground, try to hit a specific pace without seeing your watch or try guessing your heart rate and pace while running and then check your watch.

Over time, you’ll get to know yourself better and learn to differentiate between the different discomforts: the ones you have to embrace and the ones you have to back off.

Then you will learn when its time to continue, head down, pushing closer to that wall, or recognize when to stop and save your health and season.

Coach Thoughts

The athletes I coach know how much I love hill runs. But why? First, they help you develop running specific strength. Second, as you will run slower on a climb, speed becomes secondary and the feeling will be the determinant factor of your pacing strategy. Third, running uphill is less stressful for the body as it has less impact than flat or downhill. Lastly, you will have to run with shorter strides and higher cadence, and the technique and the way your foot hits the ground will improve as well.

If you liked the newsletter, forward it to a friend!!

Did someone forwarded you this email? Subscribe now!