Search Results for: nerves

Underestimate Me: Confidence is malleable, believe in yourself through it all

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Running as an underdog rocks. Being an unknown is easy, and it’s just as fun to shock people. But shock wears off and then expectations can start to build. The thing is, EVERYONE has failures, set-backs, off-days and that’s when the critics start. The underestimating. Dealing with nay-sayers comes in running and it comes in life. The thing is, you can USE those crappy words to your advantage. Let them underestimate you, let them think you’re not capable. Flip all that crap into motivation to prove them wrong. The times you get into trouble are when you start to doubt YOURSELF. Everyone have doubts, those moments of weakness, but the key to keeping those moments fleeting is by looking within yourself and believing. Believe in your abilities and your goals. Much easier said than done, certainly…kind of like saying running is just putting one foot in front of the other and then go really fast. The mind is quite tricky, it can fool you into believing you can’t. But you can also fool IT…it’s all in how you think of it. Confidence comes in waves and it’s malleable; to get to the point of BELIEVING in yourself you sometimes just need to fake it ’til you make it. Everyone has doubts, the people who achieve their goals do two things: 1) They set goals with passion. It has to REALLLLY mean something to you, because you’ll have to work your @$$ off to reach them. 2) They refute their doubts. When you catch your mind slipping, “I don’t think I can do this” you need to refute that, “H*ll yes, I’m doing this!” It’s not a question. Of course goals can change, and there is a difference between being totally delusional and just confident in yourself. Certainly. Sometimes you have Continue Reading →

Youth Running: Not a question of age but rather, the relationship

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I love running, I think it’s the BEST sport in the World. But it’s a hard sport, mentally and physically. Like really hard. Running isn’t like most other team sports, there can be a fantastic team aspect, but ultimately running is a test of YOU against YOURSELF. The rigors of training, hard workouts, are a lot to ask of oneself, us runners are quite demanding. Those demands should come internally and 99% of runners are the type-A, OCD personalities who tend to be their own harshest critics. THAT kind of drive and motivation is what separates runners from the slew of people making New Years Resolutions that don’t eclipse January. The traits that can make you the best can also suck the joy from your running if you’re not careful. So my stance on youth running and seeing stories like THIS, a 13-year old racing a string of half-marathons, my initial reaction is to cringe. Again, I LOVE running, and believe there is a way to introduce youths to such a wonderful sport, the benefits there are enormous: * Create a lifelong passion with exercise and fitness * Improve goal-setting and hard working habits * Boosted self-esteem * Introduction to one kickbutt AMAZING community of runners If they wind up setting any PR’s or being any good at the sport, cool beans, but that’s not the goal at that point. When youth running can turn into a nightmare, often times it’s because TOO MUCH is being done. Too much mileage, too many workouts, too much intensity of workouts, too much pressure that’s NOT coming from within. When a child is running more for a parent or coach, when that child feels like their own self-worth is tied up in that, THAT is when things are ugly. It’s hard to pinpoint Continue Reading →

Running: You wanted honest

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Running can be your most simple relationship if you let it. It will give you the truth, even on days when the truth hurts. But other days the truth is SO awesome you have to stare at the watch a few times just to make sure it’s actually THAT awesome. So let your relationship with running stay simple. Don’t let your head over-complicate things. Don’t fight it, relax to run fast. Don’t doubt, don’t believe your brain when it says “this hurts…I’m done.” Running. Can you handle THAT much honest?? 😉 ——- Tips on keeping your brain from making things too complicated: Dealing With Pre-Race Nerves Bad Workouts and Races Stay Relaxed to Run Faster Burned Out? Get the passion back. ——- 1) How do you keep your running relationship simple and healthy. Biggest tip is to just remember you love it and have fun with it. Don’t lose the fun part. 2) How do you manage your pre-race nerves? 3) How do you make sure not to ‘fight it’ when you want to run faster?

I’m a Runner and I’m Special: And I know it, and I like it

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Even when things suck, focus on your goals and go for a run. This can apply to life, it can apply to training, it can even apply to running a business. Reaching your goals and getting what you want for yourself is a collection of days, weeks, months, and years. The celebratory moment(s), the races everyone see, you have to earn them with an infinite number of moments not a single person ever knew existed. The solitary miles at dawn, the second run as the sun sets, the grueling track sessions, the mental tests where you fight to keep pushing when your brain is screaming at you to stop. That’s the reality of training, and the only person who really can hold you accountable is yourself. There will always be HARD sh*t, setbacks, obstacles to overcome, and in order to get through them requires you put in the fight. Now there are REWARDS along the way, that keeps you going; I mean c’mon, let’s not paint this ugly picture like all that training isn’t fun and awesome. Awesome in a kind of sick, twisted, hurts so good, kind of way, but awesome none the less. But let’s not dodge reality, running and training isn’t for the pansy-@$$e$ of the world. Perhaps a part of the draw, if us runners are brave enough to admit it, is knowing that we’re ‘special’. We’re different, we can push ourselves to do things most other people couldn’t or even WANT to. Nah-na-na-na-na-nah. I mean, who in their ‘right’ mind decides to head out for an 18 mile run? Do a workout where you hit halfway and you’re pretty sure even your eyeballs have lactic acid, but you take the recovery jog and move onto the next? Runners play tons of mind games to get Continue Reading →

Runner Legs Are Complainers: 5 important ’tissues’ to avoid a total toddler-level tantrum

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“If you’ve got an issue, here’s a tissue.” Certainly that fits with the ‘runner mentality’ for many things. Intervals hurt, well, they’re going to hurt until we finish all the repeats. Long runs are…long. Yup, that’s how it goes. Just keep telling yourself to make it one more mile, one more mile, etc…until your done! Then the legs start having their issues. They’ll start begging for their own tissues. The way to stave off some total toddler-level tantrums from the legs are to supply them their tissues on a consistent basis BEFORE their demands are too high. * Tissue 1: Warming the heck up. Don’t go into a workout with ‘cold’ legs. Don’t immediately blast like a bat out of he**, your legs like a little warning. “We’re going to workout now”…gradually lower into the pace and you’ll feel better, wind up running faster, and avoid the lactic acid booty-lock shuffle home. * Tissue 2: Stretching. Yea, stretching is NEVER as much fun as running but if you want to run better you need to be loose. You’ve got to have the flexibility to open up your stride, you want as much range of motion as possible. So suck it up, get your stretching and yoga time in, your legs will thank you with faster times AND less injuries. * Tissue 3: Massage. Look, I’ll be honest and say I’m as not-rich as the next person, so I self-massage regularly but I’m ALSO re-learning how imperative it is to see a professional massage therapist when I can. Running is pretty abusive on the body and to un-do some of that damage you need that massage work. Look at it as an investment in YOURSELF. Namely your sanity (my sanity hinges upon my endorphin fix) because the longer you run the Continue Reading →

A Distance Runner Finding Sanity in Motion

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Being still makes me nervous. Being at ease makes me feel uncomfortable…it’s like it’s just too easy. Quantifiably, perfectly insane runner logic I’m sure. But it’s true both physically and mentally. My mind races way faster than my legs do these days. One of the reasons I love running, find comfort in it, is that for a moment (well, however long my run is, so longer than a moment) my brain IS at ease. The maniacal whirring is channelled down to a single task. Honed down to the run. Running gives me an odd sense of time; hours could pass by in the blitz of an eye. Conversely, single minutes can feel like eternity (hello interval repeats!). But through all of it, my flipping brain gives me a break and shuts the heck up! Silenced. Put at a COMFORTABLE ease. Left. Right. Left. ——— Your brain can be your greatest asset as a runner or your greatest weakness. HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE are all posts related to the mental side of running and coming out the winner in the pain, brain drain game. ——— 1) Zoning out during a race or hard workout is an effective way to numb out the pain and keep pushing. What is one way you ‘zone out’? Pick a spot on the person ahead of me and think of nothing else. 2) Easy runs are apt to leave your mind wandering and coming up with some crazy thoughts. Care to share some of the stranger thoughts you’ve had? 3) A minute has never felt longer than ————, a minute has never felt shorter than ————. …during the second to last interval…during any kind of recovery between reps

Distance Running: A world far crazier (better) than anything past the looking glass

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Running is a crazy, paradoxical, numerical-obsessedo, backwards world. Just when you don’t think you can run another step, you push through five more minutes, then instantly you feel like your legs have transformed into two totally different running entities. You go on for miles. The first interval for a runner can sometimes feel like the worst. That’s where the nerves are, getting started. Races are even crazier, poised at the line, in the seconds before the gun is about to CRACK you feel certain if they take any longer to fire it you’ll explode. Then, CRACK, and the whole world slips away. “Back to those intervals…ya, suckers say the hardest is the first one…plowing through miler number three of five HAS to be more painful,” you think. You then say, “Legs, don’t worry, this is the last interval we have to so…promise.” You say that after every one. Until you finish. Scr##w honesty. Funny how a running partner that you train with feels like a war partner. You come to know them so well, read their breathing and stride as well as your own. You become intrinsically linked in the shared quest for your best. Easy days can feel like the epitome of hypocrisy sometimes. Out of nowhere getting blessed with one of THOSE days is a special kind of euphoria a runner never forgets. The good days, the slog runs, the meh ones, the mentally tough workouts you’re proud of, the long runs that you wish never end…all of it. It’s crazy stuff. But it’s runner crazy and we wouldn’t have it any other way. 1) Just before you start a race, what makes you feel confident on the line? 2) Best lie you’ve told yourself/legs to get through a workout? 3) One of THOSE days, how many do Continue Reading →

Brain Warp: Running mentally tough by changing how your brain interprets those pain messages

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A runner’s brain is constantly being flooded by sensory input information. Feedback from the muscles, skin, lungs, eyes, ears, feet, nerves from everything. It’s a matter of taking all of these messages and warping them into what is in the runners’ best interest. The Physical Messages Typically the loudest feedback responders are going to be from your muscles and lungs. Here comes relays from your cardiovascular system and lactic threshold responders. The muscles announcing they are being worked, those mitochondria are breaking down glycogen and supplying your energy to run on; they are attention mongers demanding to be credited for their work. These are pretty basic, primordial messages to your brain. Instinctual. You can’t change that these messages will be sent and that they are mostly containing shouts of pain, complaints, and fatigue. You can’t control what messages are coming in while you are running but you CAN control how you interpret them. A runner that is mentally tough is able to manage and get as close to ignoring certain sensory feedback as they can. * Anticipate: Incidentally the ability to manage what your legs and body are telling you while you run starts before the first step. This is anticipating the uncomfort in pain. It is a reality, but it is one we must both accept and deny. Accept the race and workouts will hurt but deny that we will let that pain break us. Anticipating the pain is a lot different from fearing it. * Realize: Once you realize that EVERYONE will hurt when they push themselves running, not just you, a runner doesn’t feel alone. Admitting pain is present is not a weakness, admitting that these workouts are tough isn’t a weakness…it only becomes a weakness when you start to believe you can’t do the workouts. * Continue Reading →

Distance Runners Getting Their Speed Work On: The multi-level approach to getting faster

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Getting a runner to be faster is an interesting undertaking. It’s actually a concept that coaches and athletes have been trying to perfect for centuries. As science has improved, training has evolved, we’ve created training phases and workouts that push the runner and train their body. Simplistically it’s easy to sum it up like this: if you want to run faster, run faster. This is true of course, doing speed work and improving your base speed, is going to enable a runner to run a faster pace as the distance gets longer. As in, if you improve your mile time you’ll be able to run a 5k and 10k faster. If you don’t do speed work you’ll never improve your speed. Though as I said, that’s overly simplistic, and if a runner is truly wanting to see how fast they can be they need to open their eyes and expand their training logs to include ALL of the factors that make a runner faster. You see, the body is an interconnected machine, you can’t just concentrate on straight running workouts. I’ve been working on a series for Competitor.com tied to speed work and the other techniques that enable a runner to, well, run faster. There are drills, strength work, and a neuromuscular component to getting faster. Check out the series so far: What Distance Runners Can Learn From Sprinters The Neuromuscular Component to Speed Work Distance Runners Staying SHARP During an Injury In reading each of them you’ll see that the first step to getting faster is working on your shorter-repeat speed. You shouldn’t avoid those 200’s even if you’re a 10k and above runner. But that’s ONE step in the process. After that you’ve got to build the synapses and teach the nerves to fire faster; your brain is Continue Reading →

The Distance Runner’s Warm-up: Get your body and your mind prepared to run FAST

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The runner’s warm-up is a unique time. Before a hard workout, and even more-so for a race, there’s a lot that needs to happen both physically AND mentally. A warm-up tells your legs to ‘wake up’ because they’re about to start running fast. Gradually notching down the pace, starting with the relaxed running, prepares the legs, rather than a complete SLAP in the face…the shock of a hard 400 off the bat. Got a bit of the lazy bug or backwards thinking towards the warm-up? (ie: Thinking that you’re ‘saving energy’ for the workout/race is backwards logic…hehe) * Physiologically: Those super expensive cars can brag about going 0-60 in seconds, but your body doesn’t work that way. Sort of like you wouldn’t want to get ripped out of bed and chucked into the middle of a tempo run, your legs need time to adjust to, “Okay, time to run,” then “Okay, time to run FAST!” The science behind it can get wordy, but basically muscle function and glycogen burning (sourcing energy) works most efficiently when done through negative splits. Start slow (ie: running a warm-up) and work into those faster paces. * Feels ‘easier’: Thanks to that science, your muscles, once introduced/eased into that pace, will make the same times feel relatively easier. You will be able to then run faster off of a proper warm-up. I think all runners are down for that. * Mentally prepare: The warm-up is also a time for runners to get their heads on straight. Visualize what you want to accomplish during the workout, quell those nerves and keep them in check. Remember that you will stay relaxed and controlled when the pain is setting in. What is a ‘real’ warm-up? Studies are proving there should be more elements to your warm-up routine than Continue Reading →