No, I haven’t completely fallen off the wagon, only in the blogging sense! But running has continued … I had a bad week when we were in Spain, having cricked my neck on the flight over, but things picked up okay after that.
The thing was, I had a 10k booked for one week after the Spain trip. It was first race I’d done in ages, I’d missed a week of training and two long runs, and I made every mistake in the book. I got caught up in the excitement, went out too fast and bombed after the first 5k. I did the first 5k in 21 minutes and the second 5k took a full 10 minutes longer! And I felt awful to boot.
It took me a while to get my head around it, but obviously the only thing to do is to learn from it and move on. Here’s the low-down:
- Be honest about where you’re at. I hadn’t raced in ages, I am still recovering from the fall that locked out my SI joint in February AND I’d missed training due to a minor injury. But I went into the race as if I was fit and race-ready: bad move.
- Stick with your plan. I’d told myself I was going to treat the race as a training run, then I got swept up in the energy of the people around me and went out too fast: fatal mistake.
- Comparison is a fool’s game. I beat myself up because I’m not as fast as I know I can be, others are quicker, blah blah. Comparison can be motivating, or it can totally take the fun out of running. So I’m going to keep a low profile and run to my own stopwatch.
Tomorrow is the Geneva 21k. I can beat myself up over the fact that I’m not going to run a quick time, or I can run within myself and relish the treat of being in a beautiful city and running a fun race. I choose fun 🙂
Safari Runner 