Even in my few short years coaching recreational runners to achieve their goals, you can start to pick out a few key themes and messages that are likely to stand the test of time and outlast whatever the latest, hilarious marketing trends of the week are.
One of those key messages is the importance of the mental side running, as opposed to the physical side.
Many conversations. One common theme: Runners Guilt.
Yep, it’s a real thing. People of all shapes and sizes feel guilty for running. Whether you are a busy executive, a shift worker, a student, a stay at home parent or all of the above, runners guilt can stop you getting your running off the ground or keeping up your training routine.
“Why do I feel so guilty when I go for a run?”
An old coach of mine had a very simple saying, "finish at the finish."
Seems simple enough to do, right?
In a race or event, this absolutely makes sense but he also used to say this during almost every training session. Whether it was an easy recovery run or a hard interval session, 'finish at the finish' still rings true. Just like you can’t imagine stopping your race 100 metres before the finish line, nor should you imagine this during training. We are creatures of habit and by finishing actually at the finish and not before, we are looking to create a positive habit that is reinforced in each and every session, not just when the coach is looking.
One of the topics I seem to come back to often as a coach is ‘environment.’ By environment I don’t really mean climate change and planting trees, nor do I necessarily mean a high performance environment like high altitude training camps, this is more about the environments that we choose to train, socialise and are raised within.
During my time in Switzerland recently, it became really obvious that the environment was conducive to having more fit people. Let me explain…
Even coaches still benefit from being coached. Whilst they are busy sharing their knowledge with others and helping to structure their training, increase accountability and get results, they too, can do with help from time to time. There are coaches out there who are former athletes, there are coaches who have never been athletes and there are coaches like myself, who still have athletic ambitions. There are plenty of pro’s and cons to each situation, but no matter what a coach' own personal experience in the sport, few coaches would claim that they know it all. In fact, if they do claim to know it all, I would say that they are deluded.
Our Run Group in Port Melbourne has been going for a couple of years now and during that time, I have been asked a lot of questions both as the coach and as the organiser. There are certainly themes to these questions and one of the big ones is around ‘fear.’ That fear is usually shown in the person not wanting to be the “worst" or slowest person in the group. One new arrival even messaged me before their first session to say, “I've never joined a running group before. I'm probably going to be way behind even the slowest person there.”
The post race break usually means a quadrupling of our food and alcohol intake (particularly in ‘fat week’), accompanied by plenty of reflections on the race that has gone, discussions about what we enjoyed, where you can improve, and questions about what race might be next. This down time and reflection period is really important. It allows for recovery both mentally and physically, but it usually isn’t long before the ‘What’s next?’ question rears its head… Cue animated predictions, planning sessions and discussions with friends for races that we want to sign up for.
With so many events on the running calendar these days and entry costs going through the roof, it is becoming tricky (and expensive) to decide which event is actually the right event for you.
One of the most popular questions that we ask other runners is the question of, “what’s next?”
I’m going to be honest and declare that I have a love / hate relationship with this question. This stems from the moment I finished my 17th and final marathon of 2017, after running races around Australia to raise money and awareness for the Baker Heart and Diabetes Institute. I had put myself through a lot physically and emotionally that year, particularly for that final marathon. I was relieved and elated to be finished the running and fundraising challenge, but within 2 minutes of finishing, I was being asked, "what’s next?" For some reason, it felt almost criminal to take anything away from that moment and from the sense of achievement, by simply moving on. Don’t get me wrong, I already knew what was next for me, but for some reason I reacted against the assertion that there needed to be something next and that I couldn’t simply enjoy this particular moment for what it was.
For those of you running at Melbourne Marathon Festival on 13 October, congratulations on getting this far in your training. You will mostly have gone through the tough, long preparation for the 10km, half marathon or marathon distances and are now entering (or about to enter) a taper period, to freshen you up for race day. This is a weird and wonderful couple of weeks where many people can screw their races, so I thought it would be useful to run through five 'anti-screw up' tips with to help keep you focused and ready to roll when you get to the start line.
Running the Great Wall of China was a pipe dream. I confidently stated this one was top of my wishlist even though I couldn’t really explain why. There were so many amazing runs out there to do, but it was just the one that needed to be my first international race. Forty was looming so why not pencil it in as a birthday present to myself?!
I am fortunate to know a lot of inspiring people, none less so that my dear friend Kelvin who over the course of the last eleven years has completed 34 marathons including on Easter Island, Petra, Bagan Temples, Boston, New York, Tokyo… the list goes on! He was the one who I’d first floated the idea with and if I was going to do the trip it had to be with him.
May 2019 was scheduled to be ‘our year’ for China however in November 2017 my husband Paul and I shared the news with Kelvin that after several rounds of IVF we were pregnant and due in June 2018. He was super happy for us of course and over dinner graciously suggested that maybe 2019 wouldn’t be the year for China and perhaps we postpone it to 2020. 11 months was a relatively quick turnaround to birth a baby and be back running marathon distance after all. Perhaps I could do the half-marathon I suggested, but Paul being Paul said if you are going all the way to China you’d be crazy not to do the full! It didn’t need to be fast , I just needed to do it and conquer those steps so it was the perfect event to aim for! I had his blessing to go, despite the fact that logistically he wouldn’t be able to join us, now all we had to do was have our baby and then make a running come back!
Lots of runners are keen to do the physical running that forms the bulk of their training, but not so keen to get the right amount of rest and recovery that will actually enable them to run at their best. Unfortunately this is an all too common approach that many recreational runners as they dig themselves into physical holes or repetitive cycles of injury, which could have been avoided through adequate rest and recovery.
Given that we are coaching and running in the ‘endurance sports’ space, the number of hours spent training and the subsequent stress that we on our bodies, is high. As a result, we have got to make sure that we recover adequately and give something back to our bodies.
So what can we do ourselves to help our own recovery?
Any attendees at GoRun Group over the past couple of years will know Caz. Caz left Melbourne and moved to Switzerland with her husband, Michael at the beginning of 2019, where she is still running and progressing in leaps and bounds. However, Caz has suffered her fair share of frustrations as a runner, with tight and painful lower legs whenever she ran, an issue she never thought she would be able to break through. Thankfully things are on the up, but Caz wanted to share her story of the bumpy road to consistent running, as other runners suffering the same frustrations may be able to relate. Here is her story, in her own words…
One of the key things that I try to instil into the runners that I coach, is to "finish strong.” They are two simple words that may not seem like much when written into a training plan, but they make an enormous difference to how you run.
To show you what I mean, take a second to think about the different feelings in these two scenarios…
It’s probably not a very politically correct thing to say, but yes sometimes you can fall out of love with parkrun. Having done over 150 parkruns, I can very safely say that the vast majority have been hugely enjoyable experiences and I would not trade my Saturday morning jaunt around the lake for much else. I have dressed up, ran with no shoes, come first, come last, plateaued, PB’ed, paced people, raced people and most things between! However, like many parkrunners, there have been times when my motivation has dipped and you sometimes just fall out of love with it for a while. Now, I am not a doctor but I am going to diagnose this as 'hitting a parkrun rut.'
So when this awful ‘rut' strikes, what can you do?!?
