It's pure mental, so it is

In my first blog I was talking about my fear of not being able to complete the Women's 10k. Certainly when I chickened out last year it was the fear of not being able to physically make it to the finish line, but almost a year on I'm now discovering that the mental challenge is just as difficult to conquer as the physical one. In fact you could say that once your body is in shape enough to run for an hour or thereabouts (I fall into the 'thereabouts' camp), you've kinda got a 10k licked (I'm not saying my body is in that shape yet though!).

Then I hit the treadmill tonight and despite running 7.5k and 6k in my last two sessions of this week, I only managed a paltry 3k tonight! And for the past few hours since getting home I have beaten myself black and blue (metaphorically) about such a rubbish performance. I mean, what a waste of energy is that though! It would have been much easier to not have given up at 3k and tried to run for just another couple of kilometres than to spend all evening brooding about it.

So, I guess I need to give myself a mental kick up the bum and a) don't give up so easily when things aren't going my way (eg I hated the music on my ipod tonight, I hated where the treadmill was in the gym) and b) don't waste so much energy going over and over what went wrong, when I can't go back in time and change it anyway! Rome wasn't built in a day and the next few months of training are certainly not all going to be wine and roses.....The wine and box of Roses will come on the evening of 9th May!

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

PS I didn't know whether to post this tonight cos I thought it was all a bit negative and feeling sorry for myself but talking to my friend after the gym she said she likes it when she reads about other people's not-so-good experiences of training. Not cos she revels in their pain, but cos she says at least you know you're not the only person who feels like that! So this is for you N :-)