SimpleSoleProject

Two things: 1)  This weekend is the 35th annual Lincoln Marathon.  2)  The term “swag” has been circulating among the kids I coach this spring. Swag is something cool, something that gives you confidence.  These two go together.

Half and Full Marathons can be really scary, whether you are veteran of the distance or a first-timer, it is a great unknown.  You put in the training, the early mornings, the sacrifices of eating and time and family and personal enjoyments and hope for the best on race day.  These are not short term sacrifices either.  For some it has been months, if not years, in the coming.  On Sunday morning, there will be a lot more nervous looks than confident ones. So here is my advice.

-Put that swag on in the morning.  Put your best/favorite/most flashy running outfit.  You look good, you run good.

-Put that swag in your head.  The sacrifices mentioned above?  Yeah, they put you in the right place to run well.

-Put that swag in your heart.  The body’s ability is far greater than you think it is.  If you truly want to do something, it will get done.  There will come a time Sunday where it will be really, really hard.

Remember that swag in your heart.

Some are awesome.  Some are sad.  Some are funny.  To keep you inspired this Spring and heading into the marathon weekend in two weeks, I cherry-picked a bunch of classic running photos from this letsrun thread.  Feel free to click on any photo in the slideshow below to go to the web album.  I tried to name the files with who is running and when  and where.  Sadly, I could not give copyright credits at all, so I do apologize for that.  I also apologize for the lack of photos featuring women, I did a web search and there is not much out there.

ANALYZING A HARD WORKOUT OR RACE.

Most people use this to get feedback on their day’s effort:

It is good and fine to use the ole’ GPS to get your data.  But what I am thinking about is when you get done with your race or big time workout and are cooling down, drinking (water, chocolate milk, beer, whatevs) and you and your training partners get to discussing.  You look at terrain, weather, how you felt heading into the effort, how you felt during, how you feel afterwards, your shoe choice, the weather, your splits, your average pace, what you ate or drank before and during.  You spin the workout if you ran badly (i.e. make some excuses). You pound your chest in a modest way if you killed it.  You look at what you could have done better.  You look at what you excelled at.  You ask your training partners how their run and give THEM feedback.  You commiserate, you celebrate, you ran hard.

As I was trying to avoid falling on my butt on what seemed like the 17th downhill, or uphill, of this 12k trail at Platte River State Park I could not help but think to my post from this morning.

Lots of times we make excuses to set the bar low so we are not let down from what we consider to be an underachieving effort.  I think this is a common trait among runners.  But I think a better strategy for us would be to just go run if we aren’t feeling it when it comes to racing.

Which is what I did this morning.  Started back from the front, relaxed (as best I could the first section of running), kept it rolling, and it netted me a top 5 finish without injury.  Might be a bit sore from slipin’ and slidin’ for 7 miles on the trail, but whatevs.

So I went on a date a number of years ago.  I always considered myself to be the kind of  person who makes a pretty good first impression.  In spite of my flaws (heck, we all have them), I felt like my first date experiences usually went pretty well. On this particular date, I had cold-called this young lady.  She was a friend of a friend.  While I was in my mind my usual charming/respectful/nice self, I wasn’t exactly focused on the date itself with a lot going on at school. The date went okay, but it was definitely not what I thought of being something special.

This seems to happen a lot in life.  You prepare for things as best as you can.  It might be an exam in school, an interview, a date, a presentation at work, or in the case of many of you reading this, a race.  Some of these things you love to do, some you don’t and despite all of your prepping, you go into this event knowing that you do not have your “A” game or anything even close to it.  That is tough to do.  You try to make excuses or maybe even get out of it.  But that shouldn’t be the mission.

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Today’s entry is inspired by an article on Runner’s Tribe.

One of the greatest challenges I have as a high school coach, is getting kids out to run.  I am not the dynamic personality that many of the great high school coaches are.  Though this is something I am working on. The school I coach at is high on diversity, low on socio-economics (which typically equates to a low priority on physical fitness), and is generally a challenge to motivate students to give the distance team a try. Don’t get me wrong, in the nine years we have been open, we have had some serious studs.  But that is not how you build a program or tradition.

Now I suspect that most people that read this site are runners themselves and are asking, “Who wouldn’t want to run?” Well, teens, that is who.  Reasons are many fold; too hard, I’m not a runner, I don’t want to get last, only dorks run, the results are seen only after months if not years, etc, etc.  So you find the kids who get out and do the best you can with them.

I bring up this little anecdote as a way to talk about a bigger problem.  Running is really not that exciting for non-runners.

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