A concept that Paul C mentioned at lunch and Gordo blogged about has been rattling around in the (vacuous) cage upstairs. In Gordo's words:
When we find something emotionally difficult -- odds are -- the situation is bumping against personal fears and challenging our self-image. True confidence arises from acceptance of our own performance not the capacity to dominate the performances of others.
I generally agree. How I see my fitness has a dramatic effect on how I train, how much I enjoy it and how much I progress.
When I'm not very fit but I think I am I find nothing but frustration, session after session. When I'm not very fit and I know it I see small progress every day and feel like I'm slowly climbing a mountain.
When I'm super fit I rarely acknowledge it, instead concluding that I'm overtrained or that somebody spiked my coffee with EPO (thanks dudes, btw.) I never want to believe that I'm at near pinnacle of my personal fitness because of the fear that it's not the fitness of my dreams. This causes me to back off and not push to the next level which would be better yet (but of course not the fitness of my dreams.)
Clearly my own experiences validate Paul C and Gordo's thoughts... when I accept where I'm at I progress. When I don't, lines get crossed and things aren't fun.
I've also experienced the same thing in business. When I'm willing to admit that something isn't working I can change tactics and move forward. Lots of parallels here... I treat business like an athletic event.
Knowing all of this, how do I use it?
That's the tricky part, and most of what's been rattling around upstairs. Over the last few weeks I've been in a funk. So on runs I've said "you're not fit, you can slow down and build a base." And logically I've believed it.
But it didn't work... I was still miserable.
Enter, Deep Survival (because most of my life analysis stuff usually ends up there by default.) My logical self knows that I'm not fit. My numbers show it. My body feels it. I'm not fit right now.
But my emotional self is afraid that I wasted the early part of the season, that I won't have time to re-build for late season races and that with family and work I won't be able to carve out the time to train any more. I notice myself saying, just every now and then, "well, maybe I'm actually very, very, very fit and that's why my heart rate is so low today." Or, "I only missed my PR by 13 seconds just three weeks ago." Nevermind that all the numbers tell me this is not the case.
I tell myself that I suck (intellectual self) 5,000 times over the course of a run. I tell myself that maybe I'm super-fit (emotional self) once or twice.
And clearly emotional self wins. Which is exactly what Deep Survival says... emotional self is terribly powerful, can lift cars. But emotional self is rtarded and needs intellectual self to keep it in check.
My point is that simply knowing about the misalignment is just the first part of the equation. Knowing the remedy (accepting your self) is another part. And the most important part, actual acceptance, takes time. I don't really know how or why it happens but I do know that after the 100,000th time intellectual self screams "slow the F down!" emotional self will get it and my perception of self will be in alignment with my physical self.
And then my muscles will improve and I'll be out of alignment again.
Anything I can do to reduce the time it takes to get emotional self to accept reality will improve my performance, in all of my life. Gordo's strategy for this is called RASU, Relax and Soften Up. He's got some good posts up about what it means to be soft. I interpret much of this as his attempt to gain skill at accepting his own self (and help others do the same.)
30 Min Swim, 10 Min Stationary Bike