October is my favorite month of the year as a runner. The weather is cool and crisp, the trees are changing color, all seems right in the world.
These past few days have reminded me how much I enjoy October and I’ve made sure to take some time to let it all soak in.
Have you done the same recently?
…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.
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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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.
…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.
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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