Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Embrace the Pain

I've had this rattling around in my head for the past couple of weeks - -but works has seemed to explode and having a few minutes to write something has not been in the cards.

The thought is what makes us push ourselves?  This year I am on a different plan than in the past several years -- no Ironmans for me this year.  Its shorter stuff--Olympics, XTerra - ok the endurance junkie in my had to put in a couple 70.3's.  Anyhow, the point is--I am working a lot more on speed this year.  Ironman involves a lot of long slow, dull pain.  Real speed work just plain hurts.

My mid-week cycling workouts (indoors, 2x/week with my coach) All are all focused on speed, power and strength--they are the hardest 2 hrs of my week, every week.  At the beginning of the year we started with a lot of strength work - -low cadence, long intervals - -but always pushing as much power as we could.  Now we have moved on to high cadence intervals - -that are taxing not just on your legs but your aerobic system as well.

So what I have been pondering - what is it inside us that makes us want to go into that pain cave and even look forward to getting up at 4:30 am to go there and put ourselves through an hour of hell.  It would be so easy to back off just a bit -- would coach notice that the numbers were 5 Watts lower?  If  you always gave 95% instead of 100% - that would be your norm and no one ever notice.  That extra 5% really hurts.

I don't actually know the answer--not even for myself.  I think I am getting better at embracing the pain and not listening to that voice in my head that says "don't push so hard"  I do know that I am seeing results--my power numbers are higher than I could have ever imagined - -and I have decided that I will not let my mind limit what I can do because of some preconceived idea of how high my threshold power can be - -lets let my body decide that.

So what makes you push through the pain?