Sport is about Confidence

I’m so ready to be done with running up hills for a while.  I have set out now eight times over the last three weeks to specifically run up and over hills, or as is the case at the gym just up one long steady incline.

I really do get the point, I’m building up a different type of endurance as I charge up the slopes over and over.  It is much much harder than just running on the flat ground.  I am having a hard time with it though because I find it so hard to pinpoint quantitative results.  This frustration is more so with the hill running on the trails in Jackson park than it is on the roads though.  The reason for this is that on the roads it is easy to map the distance and keep the time and know for certain that, yes, I was faster this time over the exact same distance.  In the woods it seems that the GPS on my phone is not picking up correctly and each time I do that run I am running a different number of laps around the hill and I can’t even map the route accurately so not only am I making a 1:1 comparison hard because I’m not sure how many laps I did on previous runs, but I can’t even really compare by pace because mapping the route is all wonky and I’m not really sure how far I have gone on any of those runs.

The end result of all this hill running though is that I feel slow in general.  While running the hills (outdoors) I am averaging a speed of 12.17Km/h while on my last six ‘normal’ 5k runs I have averaged a speed of 13.52Km/h.  That’s a big difference!

Today I don’t have to work until 9, I switched shifts, and so even though I ran last night I intend to get off the computer now and run my usual 5K in hopes that it makes me feel a bit faster again (my last 5K at the end of a work day was dreadfully slow, about two minutes longer than usual).

So much of sport is about confidence and perception, I simply cannot go into the Warrior Dash in a week feeling like I am slow or that will end up being the outcome.  I need to regain that feeling that I am fast with the added confidence of knowing that hills are not a problem.  Those two things combined are what will make meeting my goal for the race possible.