Each week, one of our our coaches jots down a short thought piece giving insight into elements of coaching, training, racing or mindset. This week Coach Chris talks about developing a ‘boredom threshold’ to help with your longer sessions.
Before we start, spare a thought for all those lovely Karen’s out there who have had their name tarnished over the COVID period!
Do you remember our dear friend ‘Karen from Brighton’…. the wonderfully entitled lady from Brighton, who was so bored of walking all the Brighton streets that she ended up on TV at the Tan Track, outside of her 5km radius, during the middle of the pandemic? Whilst it was a funny story and it prompted people to run their local streets ‘doing a Karen,’ there is a lesson here for us endurance runners.
Endurance running (which i categorise as pretty much anything over a few minutes) is a repetitive hobby. Thousands of steps, hours of running with your own thoughts and repeated sessions, week after week. Improvement takes time but only if you run consistently, which in turn involves a lot of repetition. Our friend Karen got bored of the repetition of her local streets. In other words, she had no boredom threshold.
The ability to withstand the tedious, repetitive training both mentally and physically (i.e boredom threshold) is a characteristic of all successful runners and those who achieve their goals, so it's a key skill to develop in our training.
Training and running doesn’t always have to be exciting, in beautiful places or provoke you to smile and be all happy clappy. Of course its nice, but its not necessary. Sometimes if you’ve got running goals that require work, it’s about keeping up the consistency in your repetitions each session, each day, each week and learning to relish the improvements that come from doing the simple, repetitive work consistently over a longer period of time.
In summary… Our friend, 'Karen from Brighton' probably wouldn’t be a great runner. Don’t be Karen...