I’ve mentioned the running group I joined in order to train for the Bolder Boulder 10k on Memorial Day. What I haven’t mentioned is that I’m the oldest in my group. And the slowest.
We’re grouped according to our race day goals and so even though we all hope to run the 6.2 miles in less than 50 minutes, some of us in the Sub 50 group are more sub than others, if you know what I mean.
We do speed workouts on Tuesday evenings and over the past several weeks I began to lose focus of my personal goals because I was too busy comparing myself to the other runners. Instead of listening to my body, I was watching everyone else. In my defense, it’s pretty easy to fall into the comparison trap when you’re continually running behind people.
Epiphany! I realized just thinking about the Tuesday night training was making me anxious and that I could do some of those speed workouts on my own. For instance, last week I ran the tempo workout (intervals) on my treadmill at home and was pleased with my performance.
Tonight’s workout is a three-mile time trial in which we’re supposed to go all out.
Ever since I learned about that time trial, I’ve been a nervous wreck. Each time I thought of it my heart would race and I’d feel awful. There was absolutely no way in hell I was going to do that run with the group. Not only that, I also gave myself permission to skip the run if it was going to cause me too much stress.
But just in case, I had Zippy use this handy tool to map out a three-mile course on the only two (mostly) flat streets in my neighborhood.
This morning I gave myself a talking-to complete with the declaration that all I really needed to do was run three miles and that it would just be a bonus if I ran them speedy-quick. No pressures.
Guess what? I ran three miles! Speedy-quick!
Three miles in my time. Who cares how fast all those young things run tonight? Not me.