Last week, the clocks finally moved forward. I had been looking forward to daylight savings time for weeks for no reason other than I don’t enjoy running at night. It is too hard to see where my feet are landing. Add snow and ice, and I need that much more will power and stubbornness to get out the door. Despite a winter that had all of the above, I somehow managed to keep my road mileage up. My speedwork, though, was non-existent. Anyone who knows me at all will agree that speed work in the dark/snow/slippery conditions is just a recipe for disaster.
So when the clocks moved ahead, I was happy to have an extra hour of daylight during my “happy” hour. And I have actually been excited about turning up my training a notch with the addition of speed work. The only problem is speed work scares me.
I’ve never been great at the fast stuff. When I was in high school, I was unable to earn a spot on the track team but our coach handed me the 1500m, the race that nobody wanted to do; I finished last. At university, a friend tried to convince me again and again to run cross country with her but memories of being the slowest on the track haunted me. By the time I started running distance in my late 20’s, I was happy to run on the roads at my own happy pace; if I wanted to do a speedier workout, I just ran faster. And I continued to run and train like that for years – actually, decades – until I started to run with Toronto Olympic Club a few years ago. It wasn’t soon before tempo, intervals, broken miles, and ladders all became a part of my weekly vocabulary. But, I am still slower than everybody else, partly due to my running history and partly due to the fact that my training partners weren’t even born when I graduated from high school. So, speed work scares me.
Last week, Coach sent me my first workouts of 2018. I had weeks to mentally prepare for this week (After all, we all knew that spring would eventually come, didn’t we?) but I was still anxious. How much would I be able to push myself? How much would it hurt? Most of all, though, I worried about what the numbers on my watch would show. How slow am I? Really?
On Tuesday night, I parked my emotions and headed to the track. Done. On Friday afternoon, I headed out the door for my second workout of the week, pushing myself up hills and into the wind for some quick intervals. Mission accomplished: two workouts on Week #1. And I surprised myself; I wasn’t as slow as I expected.
As I cooled down on the way home, I thought of my youngest who crossed his own barrier last week. After a winter of snowboarding at Glen Eden, he finally got off the bunny hills and used the chairlift. I booked a lesson for him and up he went – no friends, no family, just him and an instructor whom he had just met. I told him on the way home that I was proud of him. “When you do something that scares you, something that is going to make you better, and it doesn’t matter what that is, you’re growing.”
Cooling down, I realized that the addition of a few workouts to my running was doing the same thing. Sure, they are intended to help me get stronger and faster, but they are also forcing me to come out of my comfort zone and helping me to grow not only as a runner, but as an individual.
It’s easy to turn away from something that you don’t like; it’s hard to do something that you don’t. And when you do something that scares you, you can only grow faster.
