Lessons I'm Trying To Learn

During my orientation week of business school (almost four years ago, holy crap), a marketing professor made a presentation about Nike and Reebok in the 1980s.

Both came out with campaigns with catchy slogans.
Reebok's was "Let U. B. U.", and Nike's was "Just Do It".  You can probably guess which one was the success and which one was the huge failure.

The Nike campaign featured some of the best athletes on the planet kicking butt and then the "Just Do It" slogan.  (The best athletes wearing Nike is still a thing! Ahem Kara Goucher and Shalane Flanagan).  


The Reebok commercials?  They were kinda weird.  Well see for yourself:

 

source

The commercial featured a bunch of people who look like they escaped from an insane asylum doing crazy things and wearing Reeboks.  Kind of fun to watch, but doesn't really make me want to buy the shoes.  No wonder the thing bombed, right?

But I like the slogan.

"Let You Be You".  (or U. B. U. if you use their ridiculous spelling). 

I totally didn't do that when I was training for Eugene / Ragnar.  

It's important to understand what works for your body and I spent most of the time telling my body that it was an asshole.  

I spent most of the last couple months really disliking running and feeling sore all the time.  Pushing harder than I should.  This definitely didn't work for me physically or mentally.  I felt myself get slower.   Or at least less motivated. 

I really want to improve as a runner.  I want to be faster, love it more, be able to push harder.  So here's what I'm trying to learn.   Basically I want to take a more balanced approach to training in the future and hopefully that will pay off in loving running more and faster times! 

Lessons:

1)  Recovery: It takes forever for my legs to feel ok after a race.  So I need to let my legs recover after working out.  It seems like so many of my blogger friends are able to bang out race after race and be ok.  I'm totally jealous they are so awesome but I gotta remember that's not me. 

2) Mileage:  Right now, it doesn't seem like I can handle 50+ mile weeks without having really heavy legs.  Maybe I could gradually increase my mileage, but a jump from around 30 to 50 in a couple months was too much for me.

3)  Cross Training:  Not only do I think road biking is a blast, I also think it makes me a better runner.  In the interest of increasing running miles, I stopped biking as much.  Bad idea.  Cross training is a good mental and physical recovery for me.

4) Treat an A race like an A race:   I am the world's worst planner.  This may sound crazy, but it wasn't until a couple months back that SarahOual pointed out that Ragnar Ultra and Eugene were a week apart that I realized it.  Accidental bad planning or not, I didn't treat either as an A race.  And yet I expected an A results.  My bad ;-).

5) Races are not like a Pop Tart: As Sarah so cleverly pointed out, marathons (and other races as well...and life), are not like a Pop Tart.   Insert hard training into microwave and pull out deliciously toasty race of life?  Doesn't always work that way.  That's life, right?

6) Keeping Up With the Badasses: Stop looking at other people's training and thinking "if they are doing that, I should be doing more".  A quick recipe to feel crappy about your own training and abilities.

7) Getting A Life: I forgot to get a life. I need to have more fun in a training cycle.   That means more going out with friends, finding cool events, hanging out with Tupac holograms, and going to the OC Beer Fest. Some of those things might not be true, but you get the idea.

What works for you in your training?  Any other suggestions for how I can become a better (but not stressed out) runner?

A quick shout out to everyone running tomorrow at PCRF and the OC marathon.

And if you haven't given to Team Gab yet, go do it!