The past couple of weeks I have been in no success land. Don't get me wrong. Perhaps I can still succeed at the end of the day but my training plan was ripped off my fridge, tossed away, and I run my low mileage to prevent larger injury feeling bad about myself. Honestly, I have been feeling like a failure. When dear hubby asked if I was excited about my race on Saturday my heart started to beat faster in response to a perceived fear of failure and doubt about what my leg will do. I did tell you yesterday in my Happiness post that I am not always skipping through life. But I am still choosing happiness and trying to find the silver on my dark cloud.
And I did. With less time running I was able to pour hours into the beginnings of my training plan for well....the rest of the year! Isn't that what all runners do when they are down? Some may think a year long plan is a bit excessive but for me, it makes sense. I like to see the big picture, not just bits here and there.
So not one size fits all!
I am feeling really good about my plan so far. It is far from down as I need to double check mileage and see if it leads to my goal of 2,013 miles in 2013. What is the point of following a plan that won't meet one of my goals?
But let's step back a minute. In the past I based my plans off of what was recommended by the Smart Coach app on my phone. I would adjust their recommendation according to my life obstacles and set my plan of x-miles per day. It also guided me on training paces....kinda, sorta. And often I would have weeks I felt like a failure because I didn't hit x-miles for whatever reason. Or I would go way overboard.
Just recently I had the pleasure of taking the Running Certification Course through RRCA and yes, I plan to start offering coaching advice soon but in the meantime, I have been applying what I learned to my own training. Setting up the mesocycles makes sense. It prevents my year from being mundane. And I have some shorter races scheduled in to tune into my pace and adjust training paces as needed. The biggest change is I don't have just x-miles on a day but x-y miles. This gives me a range of miles to hit each week and I feel this is the psychological boost I may need to stick to my training a bit better because I won't get so discouraged. And I need to stick to my training if I hope to achieve my larger running goals. It is time to make running a priority on some days, the days scheduled as such. I really, really, really want to break a 4 hour marathon and to do so, I need to run and train hard!
Daily Gratitude: I am thankful for my morning conversations with darling daughter.
Daily Affirmation: I have what it takes to run fast!
