Training Shift

The last two races I've done (the Golden Leaf and the Summit for Life, both in Aspen) have had several things in common. They both occurred in Aspen, on a Saturday. They both began, and in the case of the Summit for Life, occurred in its entirety, straight up a ski hill. Both went far better than I ever would have expected. And I didn't wear a watch for either of them.

For a long time, I was a bit of a slave to my watch. I used it to time my slow runs, my tempo runs, my intervals, even my fartleks. I paid more attention to what the numbers on my watch were saying than I did to my legs and the rest of my body. I would time each mile of a race, trying to make them consistent. And more often than not, I would start faster than I thought I would be able to run, and ended up slowing down quickly, psyching myself out that I couldn't run as fast as I was.

I didn't intend to run without my watch in either of the above races, I simply forgot to bring it along with me when I went to Aspen. And it worried me for the Golden Leaf. As it turns out, despite only a month or so of solid training, I only ran three minutes slower this fall than the year before that. I think that, had I looked at my watch on points up that first hill, I would have psyched myself out again, and slowed down thinking there was no way I could pull off a decent time. I didn't have a watch, so I couldn't look, and I ran a good time.

So now I'm trying a bit of an experiment. I'm no longer wearing my watch even to train. Rather I'm listening to what my legs are telling me, and trying to gauge my effort rather than my time. And in fact as I sit here in DIA, waiting to go home to the Great White North (northern Minnesota) for Christmas, I just realized that I once again did not even bring my watch with me.

So far, what this change of tactics has done is made me come up with different ways of getting the same results. I have a couple new styles of workouts at my disposal, and several modified versions of older workouts that will work without a watch. Hopefully, as I train and relax (yes, they go hand in hand for me) I will have the chance to describe some of them here.

Until then