Experience!

Hey Gang!

 

Huge congrats to Mike Greenberg who ran the Niagara Marathon in a PB of 2:55! It was a windy day and not perfect conditions, so all the more impressive. Coming up, we have the Hamilton Half and the NYC Marathon in two weekends! This week is the last little push with some intensity, but taking the volume down. People who have done their fall races or are training to train,let’s bring our energy to get this crew to the start line ready to go!

 

What I’ve been thinking about recently is experience.Experience as it relates to aging in a way. There is really no way to go through life without accumulating experience, and there is no way to become experienced in things without the process of time. We eventually become a compilation of our experiences. I read this quote recently and it resonated: “a person is less like a star, whose very chemistry, the source of its light,changes profoundly over its life-cycle, and more like a planet, like this planet, whose landscape changes over the ages but is always shaped by the geologic strata layered beneath, encoding everything the planet has been since its birth.” – Maria Popova.

 

I like the dichotomy of this as it applies to getting older.Yes, as we age our muscles become less powerful, our tendons less springy, our joints more creaky. It takes us longer to recover from efforts which aren’t quite as fast as they once were. But we have behind us and are still laying down layers of experience. Marathons can really highlight this dichotomy. It is not always the fastest person in workouts nor the person with the highest VO2max or even the person who has strung together the most impressive training cycle who comes out on top. Often it is the person with more experience – whose mind and body know what to expect and how to react to it –who does well. This is not something you can read about to learn – it must be experienced.

 

I was chatting with a friend about the funny phenomenon that once someone breaks a certain barrier (a time barrier in running for example),it is much easier for them to do it again. It’s because their body and mind have carved the path. They’ve been there. They can’t intellectualize it, but they know how to do it. And often they can do it again, even when their training doesn’t indicate that they could.

 

I’ve mentioned this anecdote before but it’s worth mentioning again. When world renowned coach Renato Canova was asked why his world record athlete in the steeplechase wasn’t doing as high mileage as he once had, he responded that he had already developed that system as far as it could take him. He could now count on it, and focus on developing other areas. What I take from that is that the training that we are doing when we are building, is not the training we have to keep doing in order to maintain. And this applies over a life cycle of training. How we trained in our 20’s is not how we should be training in our50’s and beyond, and this does not mean we’re doing it worse. It means we are relying more on our experience and wisdom, and less on our ability to pile on more and more work. And guess what – we may land on very similar results for the effort. And you know what else? We deserve it. There are advantages to getting older and accumulating experience. So to those with a fair bit of experience: take confidence in that. You don’t have to replicate the training you did in order to get there. And to those still accumulating experience:accept the process. Every race becomes a data point and a foundational layer onto which the next ones will be built.

 

On to tomorrow’s workout! Lakeshore and Leslie – 6:05 drills, 6:15 GO!

 

1.    1.5 miles @ Marathon pace (3 straightaways), 3min rest, 1 mile @ HMP, 2 min rest, 800m @ 10K pace, 1:45 rest, 600m @ 5K pace,1:30 rest, 400 @ a lil faster, 1:15 rest, 200 light and quick. Yes, this is not un-similar to what people training for Hamilton did last week – this week you’ll just do it with more company.

(So it looks like: 3 laps, 2 laps, 1 lap, 600, 400, 200. It will make sense when we get there.)

 

2.    If still recovering and coming back from having raced, feel it out. Start at Marathon Pace, and if your legs don’t want to go faster, stay there.

 

 

 

That is all – see you in the a.m.!

 

xo

 

Seanna