^^^no doubt. the mental aspect of it is really key, easy to see that in retrospect as it was with the races. how does my brain handle discomfort? how can i help it handle discomfort better?
had a persistent headache yesterday starting in early afternoon that is still with me this morning. didn't run as a consequence. hoping it'll dissipate over the course of the day today.
right that's the thing. you can be in the "same exact physical shape" and run/race considerably faster/slower due to the mental aspect of it. sometimes you have the "fight" in you, to grind it out and go right at the pain, sometimes you don't. it's good to test the fight somewhat often (once every 2 weeks at minimum?). So just like what you did, hitting a hard ~2 mile at 5k pace or a little faster, hitting a mile at much faster than 5k pace, pre-fatiguing a bit then hitting a hard mile etc. So, avoiding the actual race distance but, testing yourself at subsets of that distance. It's not something one has to do all the time but, sometimes when you feel good (or bad and just want to push it while feeling bad), it's good to dial in on something that's going to "really hurt" towards the end and just get after it.
There's lots of "callusing" analogies with running. That's definitely what it feels like to me. Sometimes you just want to avoid stuff that builds up the callus, then you realize you've wasted lots of time (definitely applies to me), because the stuff that "causes" the callus can be pretty scary. I'm scared before all of my hard 800m-1 mile efforts etc. I have to really get my mind right before I can even take the first stride, like tonight etc - my warmup was crazy slow, but that's because I was just trying to clear my mind and focus on 1 task, knowing it would be painful at some point. Every speed session I do, is like that. lmao. No matter what it is, kicking it off feels like "fear". Then you just "go" and boom. I'll actually comment in my journal about something that's been helping me the last few weeks.
pc!
