Ryan – Page 46 – HillRunner.com

Can you talk yourself into better performance?

October 3, 2019 / Roundups / 2 minutes of reading

An interesting question to think about: can changing your self-talk actually help you run better? I’m sure many of us just answered “yes”. If you have negative self-talk, that’s not going to help you run faster. Positive self-talk will, though.

What about more subtle differences? Can slight changes in how you think of things during races help you? As it turns out, they can.

When you refer to yourself in the second person (“You can do it” instead of “I can do it”) you actually do perform better.

Also of note is that more positive references were used in the study. “You/I have to do it” was replaced with “You/I can do it” for example. While it doesn’t seem like this was addressed as part of the test, I have a suspicion this would also make a difference.

This is just one small study but it’s worth trying.

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Three lessons from my difficult summer

September 26, 2019 / Training / 5 minutes of reading

Last week, I mentioned that I had a difficult summer where I made some mistakes. The difficulties were self-inflicted and I wanted to take a few moments this week to discuss my mistakes, with the hope that some of you can hopefully learn from my mistakes and maybe avoid making similar ones yourselves.

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How to do an easy run

September 25, 2019 / Uncategorized / 1 minute of reading

I had a talk with one of you this past weekend about easy runs. It made me realize that I clearly did a poor job stressing the importance of running easy on easy runs. So I’m going to address that here.

The easy run is a critical part of our training. Even elites run roughly 80% of their miles at an easy pace. However, many runners do their easy runs too fast. This increases your risk of injury and takes away from the quality you can get on your hard days. Make sure you’re running them easy enough.

Here’s a blog post I wrote earlier this year on how to do your easy runs.

Learn from your mistakes

September 19, 2019 / Training / 2 minutes of reading

We all make mistakes at times, what we do with them is what matters

In May, I made a mistake in training. I knew better but thought the “rules” didn’t apply to me. I then made another mistake in June and repeated it in July.

These mistakes cost me but they also taught (or re-taught) me some important lessons.

What lessons did I learn? For now, they don’t matter. I’ll write about them next week. For now, the important lesson is something else.

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Goodhart’s Law and the runner

September 12, 2019 / Training / 2 minutes of reading

“When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to become a good measure.” – Goodhart’s Law

This concept, largely discussed in the world of economics, applies quite well to running and fitness in general.

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