All Aboard the Pain Train

With a little more than 4 weeks till Scotia, I have been putting in some pretty hard miles.  And it's just going to get tougher over the next couple of weeks.  I've got my but firmly planted on the pain train apparently.  What's strange is that I'm actually kind of enjoying the ride.

I'm beginning to think I'm a bit of a weirdo.  Who else gets excited when they see that their club workout is Mile Repeats?  Apparently I do.  Perhaps all that triathlon racing has upped my discomfort level a few notches, which is good because I'm going to need it over these next few weeks.

This is the Master Plan:

That is a whole lot of fast and hard running.  I know my body can take it as long as I get my recovery in.  I just have to work at training my brain to deal with it.  I've gotten a whole lot better than I used to be but I still have my "I don't wanna / I can't" moments.  Like last Thursday.  My plan called for 4x1 mile repeats within a 13km run.  I did a nice warm up, got to the track and started my repeats.  After the second one, I felt like I was mentally done.  I managed to talk myself into a 3rd one.  The 4th one however, didn't happen.  I mentally couldn't face it.  Even though I felt fine physically, I had mentally checked out.   Normally I get annoyed with myself when I do this but this time around, I didn't.  Sometimes your brain just doesn't have it and you have to be ok with that (a challenge for me most days).

The act of training is not only about training your body but training your mind as well.  Just like your body, your mind also has it's overload point.  Sometimes you need to learn to push through that and sometimes you just have to say "Screw it, today is not my day."  It's a fine balance that I'm clearly still trying to figure out.

Tonight I'll be back at the track tackling Yasso 800's.  8 of them.  That's more than I've ever done before.  I think the most I've done has been 5 so this will be a challenge.  I hope I'm done before it gets dark, ha ha.



Do you like track workouts?  Have you ever done Yasso 800's?

9 Weeks Till Scotia & Yet Another Race

Yesterday I had a nice little reminder that my second A race is only 9 weeks away.  9. freaking. weeks.  Gah.   I had a bit of a panic attack when I saw that email but quickly told myself to chill out.  Normally I like to give myself 10-12 weeks to ramp up for a half, depending on my fitness level but when I sat down an actually thought about it, I realized that I was just fine.  I've been getting good solid long runs in so distance wise I'm good.  The one thing I haven't really been doing is focused speed work.  Although I guess you could count all my racing as speed work to a certain extent.  I definitely think it's helped but I don't have solid proof.   So, to test things out, I'm going to do another race.  Yup, as if my dance card wasn't full enough already.  I've got my last tri of the season this Sunday and I'm going to follow that up with a 10km on Sept 8th.  I'm going to do the MEC 10km and use that as a race pace test.  I'll do a good warm up, probably at least 20-25 minutes, race the 10km and then do a good cool down for about 15 minutes.   That should get me about 17km for the day give or take.  The race is only $15 to enter and it's not too far from my house so that makes it a no brainer.   The outcome will determine how much track time I'm going to have to put in between then and Oct 20th, ha ha.   I'm not going to kid myself, breaking 1:30 is going to be hard and it's going to hurt.  I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a bit scared.  But if I was close to doing it in March this year, I think it's within my reach. 

Who else is training for a fall race?  If so which one?