I had not bricked a IM distance bike ride with a run before today. At about mile five on the run, it occured to me that it was totally counter-productive to be giving any thought at all to the fact that I had completed a 112 mile distance, before starting this little run, and that, My God, my legs must be exhausted, mustn’t they, and what a damned Herculean effort this s__t is, and how long can I keep running at this pace, because, after all, I just finished a massive long bike ride, and by all sensibility, I should not be running at all, and therefore I can probably not keep this pace up, and what will I do a month from now when it is not a 10K, but a full marathon, and .
And then it occurred to me that this is, in many ways, a metaphor for life. It doesn’t matter what you have done before, you need to focus on the here and now.
If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything: It is open to everything. In the mind there are many possibilities: In the expert’s mind there are few.
If you continue this simple practice every day, you will obtain a wonderful power. Before you attain it, it is something wonderful, but after you obtain it, it is nothing special.
Ahh yes…the great untapped training region…the mind! It is, after all, the greatest beneficiary of our training and racing. The untrained mind scoffs at the very idea of 2.4/112/26.2. The trained mind knows it is possible, despite every signal from our bodies telling us to quit.
People ask me what I think about, especially when I’m doing crazy workouts like 3 hours on a treadmill, or 7-8 hour bike rides. They don’t understand when I tell them I’m thinking about what I’m doing…I’m training my mind. The response is usually looks of incredulity. The next question is usually something about why I don’t listen to music or something to distract me. Simple…I don’t want to interrupt my conciousness of what I am doing.
This fall, I’m really getting back to my pre-accident levels of training, including faster running and cycling. As Slowman pointed out recently, the best way to run fast is to train fast. With a sub 3:00 goal at the Marine Corps Marathon…I have been doing hard track and tempo work for about a month an a half now. In the last couple of weeks my track work has really gotten fast…much faster than I’ve been doing for nearly 1 1/2 years now. My mind vaguely remembers what it was like to run that fast. My legs protested every step. This week was 15x400 at 75sec. Its been just over a month since my last 400s track work. I ran those at 90sec, which at the time was the first track workout I’d done in over a year and was fairly conservative. Well, the first set of 5 this week produced a protest out of my legs. They did NOT want to go that fast, even though they clearly had the ability. This turned into a very mental workout, not because the 75sec was hard on the cardiovascular side, but because the neuromuscular coordination was only vaguely there. Before my accident this would have been a routine workout. This week, it was like pushing the envelope. Anyway…long story short…the experience of training myself to run and bike fast again has relied heavily on my mental strength gained over the last 19 years or so of training and racing endurance sports. They mind is extremely powerful. Too often we shackle it with preconceived notions of what is and is not possible.