Breakthrough runs do not always feel great and that’s what we’re talking about today on the Doc On The Run podcast.
Now breakthrough runs don’t always feel great. But of course, when we think about training and we think about exercising, and running, and putting in all these progression runs, we always perceive that when we have that breakthrough run, it’s going to feel great. But I don’t think that’s true. What I think happens is that when you go out and you’ve made a big improvement and you do a run that is a lot longer, or a lot faster, and you know you’ve made a breakthrough.
Well, you think of that as your breakthrough run, but that’s not your breakthrough run. Your breakthrough happened before and the breakthrough always happens through a process of suffering. It feels painful. It feels hard. It’s not easy and the fact is, the reward of hard work feels great. You can run faster. You can run farther. You can have a PR. But the hard work part is not really easy and enjoyable and if hard work was easy and enjoyable, it would be called something else. It would be called easy work, not hard work.
The process though is the same. You do big blocks of endurance training, you do speed work, you do strength training, and your coach will tell you over and over, you have to have patience and you have to wait for those adaptations. You have to have patience and you have to wait for those adaptations to actually happen before you can move to the next level in your training. So you can’t just ramp up just because you want to. You have to build the ability to ramp up and you have to become stronger. And there are ways to supplement that.
So when you’re injured, it is the same process. It’s just demoralizing because you’re starting from such a low level. Particularly if you had the unfortunate experience of being locked up in a fracture walking boot for six to eight weeks. If you’ve been sitting still, and you’ve really lost your fitness, and you start ramping up, well the process is the same and the process of over-training injury recovery is the same as training and getting stronger. It’s just you have to maintain a different mindset and pay closer attention. That’s the only difference. But you will continue to get breakthroughs and you have to appreciate, and you have to celebrate those wins when they happen.
So if you haven’t been running for weeks and you go out and you run one mile, you have to celebrate that. You have to realize that this actually is a big thing. Particularly if you don’t have pain when you do that one mile. And then when you go out and you run three miles, you have to celebrate that. So again, if you’re somebody that’s been running marathons, three miles is not typically something you would celebrate. But if you’ve not been running at all, and you get to go out and run three miles, you’re well on the path and you have to realize that that comes because you’ve been doing this work before. You’ve been doing strength training, you’ve been doing balance training, you’ve been doing the things that you have to do to get the injury to heal.
If you do those things and you continue to wait, and you continue to have patience while you’re actually putting in the work, it will play off and you will get those breakthroughs. But just remember, when you go have, what seems like a fabulous, fantastic run, and you run six miles and it feels awesome. That’s not the breakthrough. The breakthrough came from the hard work before.
Now, if you enjoyed this episode, please like it, share it, comment, send it to somebody who needs it and if you haven’t seen it yet, join me in the 12 Steps Presentation, where I go through a deep dive of all the things I would show you how to do basically, with the process that I use, if I was sitting in your living room, or if we were on a one hour webcam call. I’ll show you the way that I would help you work through the injury and figure out whether you can run right now. You can get it for free at docontherun.com/12steps and I’ll see you in the training.
