Five Weeks To Go!! Breaking It Down. Don't Panic!

"Nothing is particularly hard if you divide it into small steps."--Henry Ford


Hi guys - Henry Ford may not have been a marathoner, but he sure had the idea about endurance performance down pat. When you're at the starting line and you're looking at 26 miles of running, or 100 miles of cycling, or who knows what else, you'll put yourself in a hole if you think of the whole day ahead of you. Little steps - the day broken up into manageable, attainable pieces - is the key to completing an endurance event. With an 19 miler planned for Saturday for our Mercedes marathoners, that above quote should have extra meaning. The training runs get longer. It gets harder to wrap your head around the task. As you train more and more for long distance endurance events, whether it be running, cycling, swimming, whatever, I think the training becomes ingrained as who you are and the event you're training for becomes a measure of how your training is going. I'm always asked "Are you training for anything?", and I answer "I'm ALWAYS training". 

You've been training for over 3 months now for Mercedes and each week you tack on a little more. Sneaks up on you, doesn't it? You've trained in heat, cold, rain, wind, a World Series, a whole football season, Labor Day, Thanksgiving, and charged right on through Christmas and New Years, and will run past the Super Bowl. WHEW!!! You look back and wonder how you've lasted that long. Well, you've lasted the same way you do the long run each week - by breaking it down into small, manageable pieces and only focus on the portion at hand and not the entire enchilada. When you look at your weekly schedule, the question is always "What's the long run this week?", not how many miles do you have to run during the 20 weeks you train. In the past, I've talked about the importance of your goal setting to be just to finish, and this week (and every week), it's to look at the run (training or the event itself) as parts, not a whole. 

Before I got my fancy GPS watch, when I'd run a marathon, I'd hit my chronograph every 3 miles. That way I break the run into just 8 parts. Three miles would allow for water breaks, potty stops, hills, short lapses of concentration (one of my favorite diversions), whatever...it would pretty much even out. Every 3 miles I look at my split time and say "good", "oops", or "crap", depending on where I am relative to my plan. These little segments are manageable to me. The point is that whether you're doing a 5K or a marathon, you've done the training and all you have to do is monitor yourself over the run so your body does what you trained it for. If you train at 10 min/mile, don't expect the Good Angel to swoop down on race day and allow you to run 9 min/mile! 

The mind will be your greatest foe - it will use every trick in the book to make you stop doing this foolishness. You MUST practice positive thinking during these last few weeks of training. Fatigue, discomfort, tightness, and whole host of other wonderful feelings are all a part of the game, but you know they're coming because you meet them every week, and as a group, you whine together and the next thing you know, there you are back where you started with another long run under your belt (elastic waistband). When you start to hit that fatigue point, acknowledge that it's there, but also realize that you're not really feeling that badly (OK, 24 miles into the marathon, you might be really feeling bad, but the balloons are close). What you are feeling is the reflection of your effort level. Focus on your breathing and your cadence, and this will shift your focus off the fatigue (I didn't say it would eliminate it). Your body is doing what it's been trained to do and that's moving you forward towards the finish line. Think only about what you need to do RIGHT NOW - pace, breathing, concentration. Thinking "I am really tired and want to just sit down on the curb and cry" has absolutely no positive benefits! Relax, concentrate on the task at hand, and perform up to your capabilities.

You are trained, but you're just not THERE yet. There are going to be training runs on the Mercedes course January 17th and January 30th and that's a good trial to see where you are and get familiar with the course. Check the Mercedes or TrakShak websites for details. If you have any comments or training questions, don't hesitate to leave them in the Comments section here or email me. Until then...

I'll see you on the roads - AL