Recent thoughts

Strava is both the greatest and worst thing to happen to my running.

That's a lie, running shoes is definitely the best thing to happen to my running, closely followed by my Forerunner 235 (soon to be my Fenix 5 I am sure) and then my Runderwear pants (I wish this was paid advertising!)

But the point stands, sometimes I just want to tell Strava to go fuck itself and sometimes I want to invite the ol' gal in for some hot coco.

Why? Well let's look at both sidea of the coin:

Pro: You can review your runs in great depth, looking at how your performace stacks up to previous attempts, something that is quite handy for long events. You can use the incredible amount of information to support your training, both increasing and/or reducing intensity and miles. Really, it's a spreadsheet nerds dream.

Cons: EGO! Ego always ruins everything. "I'm faster than this person.." "I'm never going to be faster than that person..." and all kinds of in between internal thoughts.

This post is not about Strava specifically (I feel I have done enough free promotion in this post!) but rather about my current mindset with my training.

My current goal is that of endurance running, in short, runming races over marathon distance. In the next six months my events are 35, 50, 100, 62, 45 and 50 miles. These events will see me (hopefully) running at max pace of nine minute miles, so when my Strava feed shows [almost] everyone running much faster, there is a little ego in there that kicks in and sometimes (depending on mindset) really adds some bitterness to runs upon review. This is mostly short lived, but when you've just smashes out a 20 run at faster than race pace easily (and accidentally) it should be a celebration, not a comparison.

Of course this ego problem is not just Strava based. A recent trip to Eastville Parkrun enabled my ego to utterly take over. I was 14 miles into the long run. I got carried up in the moment (and too many kids, pushchairs etc.) overtaking me and turned on the jets. Fast forward to my watch shooting me the mile check in (7 min mile) and the sudden realisation that I had to control the ego and drop the pace substantially.

Thankfully, these episodes are few and far between (pretty much why I lone goat run and steer clear of Parkruns) but the point stands.