This weekend is my favorite sports weekend out of the entire year. I find that the older I get I become slightly less interested in most sporting events throughout the year. The Super Bowl just doesn't ring the same as it used to. I don't even pay attention to the World Series because it falls at the beginning of the football season. The bowl games in college football are so watered down that I simply don't care anymore unless my Cyclones are in it, which they usually aren't. But the opening weekend of the NCAA tournament is absolutely ridiculous. I will watch every single game from beginning to extremely exciting end. How am I supposed to get my training in this weekend when there is so much excitement going on?
Well, I am deviating from my normal routine of going for my long run on Sunday afternoon and moving it to Saturday morning. Before I got sick, I was scheduled to go for my longest training run this weekend of 20 miles. Let's just say that I'm hoping for 15. If I can get 15, I'll be happy. And this brings me to my latest words of wisdom.
Throughout your training cycle, you must be able to adjust. I guess this holds true for anything in life, but since I'm referring to training here, we'll focus on that. I missed 8 days of training due to illness, and now I have the almighty NCAA tournament to contend with. Having the ability to adjust my workouts and adjust my goals is extremely critical in the success of me finishing this marathon. I initially set a goal of running the marathon and simply finishing. Then as I started training, I felt so great about my workouts that I set a time goal of 3:30:00. That would be an 8 minute mile for the whole race. Now that I have had a couple of setbacks, I was initially doubting my ability to even finish the race. But Suzy pumped me back up and got me to realize that I simply have to adjust my thinking and go back to focusing just on finishing the race. My mindset has been all over the place with this race and it's not uncommon to have this over the course of whatever it is you are training for. The key is to set your goals at realistic levels and continuously change them according to how well you are training or what setbacks you have. The better you are able to recognize this and adjust accordingly, the better you will be at achieving success.
For those of you finishing up the Triple Crown next week with the 10 miler, good luck. You guys have done a great job so far and you should be very proud of yourselves. I know my wife is very nervous about her race next week but I know she has been doing everything she can to be ready and I am very proud of her.
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