A hard conversation to have is one where you have to tell an athlete that they're trying too hard.
Running too fast.
Grinding with every ounce of their willpower.
I mean, to some extent, it works.
We all got better at one point by smashing through walls.
There were days when all you had to do was work harder than the next person. That mindset and that work ethic get you a long way. We could apply that to many aspects of life.
BUT, this will only take you so far.
You can only work so hard.
And you can only work so hard within a short period of time before your resources (physical, mental, emotional, even social) deplete.
Once it's gone... it's GONE.
Those who have experienced this know what I mean, and for those who haven't, essentially you become a broken person. Maybe literally broken, or you've just ground yourself into minced meat so many times that you're now just a sloppy mess who can't run fast to save your life.
That sucks.
I've got a solution, though.
You've got to slow down AND you've got to change your mindset.
Groundbreaking news...
But, seriously. If you're always training where you want to be, then you'll stay where you currently are. But, if you train where you currently are, then you'll get where you want to be.
That's a really hard thing to wrap your head around. Logically, you might think that you have to run x pace or x amount of miles to become an x runner, but weirdly enough, the body doesn't always love that.
The result is often underperforming on race days.
And if you've jumped fully off the ship you won't understand why you underperformed, and you'll probably run a ton after your race, and you'll probably grind yourself into oblivion the next day, or you won't take a recovery period, or you just keep going harder than ever.
And then do you know what comes next?
Probably another bad race and another moment of silence for your ego.
I'm being harsh, but really I'm speaking through experience. I've been through this more than most.
So, back to that solution.
It's very easy.
1) You need to take where you think you're at or where you were previously training and remove about 5 to 10 seconds a mile for your faster sessions. So, if you run 7 minutes per mile for your typical threshold session, you go with 7:10 instead. There's a good chance your racing is equally your training because you're training too hard. Pump the brakes.
What this does is open up more room for you to have a more manageable session, likely falling more in line with the "sweet spot," which is where you get the most amount of stress to your system that you can recover the quickest from (which turns into gained performance).
This is going to be hard to do. Nobody likes to swallow this pill because it feels like you're accepting to be worse or to be slower.
But you're not! You're just training smarter and you're giving yourself a chance to race faster. You don't want to be the workout hero who sucks at racing.
2) You need to think about your workouts in a different way. In our first step, we talked about slowing it down. Now we need to think about how you're thinking about the workout.
Do you go into a workout trying to win it? That sounds so stupid writing it out, but what I mean here is, are you actively trying to beat the workout that's laid out before you?
If you're a chronic overperformer in training, you're probably a pro at this.
In your mind, a bad workout is a workout that has a split that's slower than the fastest end of the range.
If you're doing this, you should stop. I wish I could say it more eloquently, but in my opinion, it's unhealthy and why are we gamiifying our training?
What you should do is go into your workouts with more ease, but allow yourself to progress. If you can think "negative split" everything, you'll probably be in good business.
If you can make every workout one where you start intentionally slower and give yourself a chance to potentially run faster by the end, then I think you've done it perfectly.
Maybe not all workouts will end up this way, but you can give it a try.
Like a real try. Not a "whoops I ran my first rep 5 seconds faster per mile than I was supposed so now I have to run at least 5 seconds faster for every rep for the rest of the workout."
Remember, this isn't an excuse for you to purposely make up for a slower start. Let's think with our heads...
Let's wrap it up.
Your first goal is to slow down by taking a few seconds off what you were planning to do. The second is to be a little more cool going into your workout by not trying to attack or win it and by taking a negative split attitude into it.
If you can follow these two steps, I can all but guarantee you will see more sustainable progress in the long run.
One more thing.
This doesn't mean you're not going to work hard or you're not going to do specific training - this simply means that you're going to exercise more relaxation into your training so that you can stop ramming your head into the wall and wondering why everything hurts all of a sudden.
Okay. Rant Over.
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