24 weeks, 87 miles and a different mindset around focus

I seem to be making a habit of chickening out of my morning run at the start of each week. I set my alarm to go out before work on Tuesday but my legs were still aching from last Sunday so I hit snooze. I made up for it on Wednesday with two runs of 3 laps in Post Hill Woods and then repeated this again on Thursday. I finished my weekday running with another 3 laps on Friday evening.

There was a good reference to “ ‘Draymond’s law’ on The Jump podcast this week about not wanting 82 game players and wanting 16 game players. It boils down to the idea that there are NBA players who play really well in the 82 game regular season but don’t have the same success in best of 7 playoff series, winning 16 games in the playoffs is enough for a championship. The 16 game players are the best players who are capable of having an extra gear when there are higher stakes and can still win when coaches have 7 games to plan how to negate their strengths. Ideally I want to be able to build up my fitness to a level where I can do 50k to 40 miles on trail or roads regardless of outside factors such as weather so at my absolute best I can do 100 miles once.

I had tried to apply this sort of focus to my weekend training. I did 13 laps of Post Hill Woods on Saturday and again today. These worked out at about 28 miles each and I was able to keep in my own little world for each group of 3-4 laps. My friend Tom joined me for laps 5-7 this morning and I was happy to be able to stay in a focused zone and maintain a similar pace while chatting to him. It’s taken some practice but I can manage to shut out everything around me for those 3-4 lap sections. Hopefully I can stretch this out to back to back 15 laps next weekend which will take me over 3500m of climb for the week overall.