I'm finishing up about a week of gently training my way through flu recovery and have been asked to give advice to a number of friends, family and a new member of our Master's Track team and then I read Bob's most recent post and I noticed there's a theme to all of the advice I'm giving, and using myself, these days.
Make Confidence a goal of training. Right up there with endurance, speed, strength and weight loss.
We all have those things in mind as we map out our training plans, jump into them enthusiastically, but so often we don't achieve the goals we set because something stops us. We fall off the band wagon, lose sight of the goal and then just go back to where we were to start with. Not at all what we want, and yet there we are.
Why? What the hell happens?
Looking back honestly at my own behavior I've seen injuries, illness, job changes, life changes, bad weather and just plain bad decisions derail my plans. But I also noticed something else that is by far the biggest culprit in my failures. The plans themselves.
With all the Sales training I've been through and taught others I can spout off all sorts of aspects to a good plan with no problem at all. The most important one I always preach is that you must set a goal that is both measurable and has a time table. But all my advice this past couple of weeks is about another piece of setting that goal.
Set progression goals, too.
Those also must be measurable and have a time table, and have one other very important part: they should be easy to achieve.
Progression goals help you lay out a path and time table to reach your big goal. Making them easy to achieve will help keep you on track if something temporary, like bad weather, pops up. If I have a weekly mileage goal that's not a huge stretch, missing a day is not going to blow my week. And that leads me to the most important part of having easy to reach progression goals.
Little Victories.
My biggest problem in reaching goals is that I've gotten hit with something temporary or had a setback of some sort, fall off track and then before I know it I'm not getting near my goal anymore.
So with all the folks I've talked to about running the past couple of weeks I've emphasized setting easy to reach progression goals that will help them reach their big goal. And I mean REALLY easy. You should be able to celebrate a Little Victory every day or so. One person I talked with wants to race a 10K next fall. Not just finish it; she's done that before. She wants to race one and we picked it out and have the date. Next we talked about the sort of distances and workouts that she'd be doing, but then I went to the easy progression goals. The first one we set was to put on her running shoes every day.
That's it. At the end of every day she needs to have put on her shoes once that day. No excuses. Some of the days in that week she'll run, but every day she'll put on those shoes. She might get sick, real busy or something and forget it once or twice but that can be handled by putting them on twice the next day to make up for it! Little Victories!
Experts generally agree that in order for us to establish a habit we need to do something every day for 21 days. Sounds like a piece of cake, but if the habit we're trying to form feels like work or is overly involved we probably won't make it through those 21 days with a new habit at the end of it. But if that activity is easy and even fun, we'll get it down no problem.
And with that new habit we'll get that supremely important sense of accomplishment. That's supremely important because it will help us keep moving towards the big goal. Without it we will probably get derailed and lose sight of that goal. And those easy to reach progression goals give us the opportunity to get that sense of accomplishment whenever we need it!
A variation on that theme of setting easy to reach progression goals is to plan your workouts to do the exact same thing. A long run doesn't happen in an instant. Hell, neither does a sprint workout. There's time and reps and opportunities to feel good about what's happening if we plan for them.
This morning I had on my schedule to do 800's. I wrote that done when I laid out my training plans to get me to the Indoor Nationals I'm running in at the end of March. Then I got the flu and it wrecked all that. Or could have. But I have progression goals all through my plan and I've been thinking through each workout or run in a way that will make me feel like I'm getting somewhere. So this morning it was cold and raining and I was NOT going to go out feeling like I'm 80% just so I can get sick again and lose another couple of weeks.
Instead I had figured out how I would do the same workout on a treadmill, so I was going to get this done despite the weather. I got to the gym, got the machine going and figured out how to do the speed controls easily. Little Victory number 1!
My original plan had me doing six 800's because I was only able to do four three weeks ago and figured I would be in better shape right now. But I'm not. I'm still coughing and not entirely back up to strength. Knowing that, but really wanting to get the full workout in, I decided to make the first ones slower than I would have. The treadmill made it easy to set a 3:20 pace so that's what I did for the first two dropping down to a walk, then jog of 12 minute pace for a quarter mile between each rep. This meant I would be resting a little longer than my typical three minutes, but I was also covering a 400 between each 800 which I never do. Little Victory number 2!
The first one felt tough, but the first one always feels harder than it should. It's called warming up. The second one felt like I didn't even really try and I was breathing pretty well with only a little bit of a cough here and there. I picked up the pace to 3:14 for the next two reps, was breathing hard, but breathing. It felt like running! I knew I could get two more in no problem. Little Victory number 3!
Telling myself to celebrate those Little Victories got my confidence rising and I decided to push the last two reps. 800 number seven I clicked through in 3:04. That had me gasping pretty good, but I felt strong all the way through. One more and I was going to go sub-3. Once again I set myself up to succeed and celebrate by setting the pace on the treadmill at 6 flat, or 3 flat for the first half of the last 800. When I had one quarter to go I was huffing, but hit the speed button just once to drop two seconds off the last "lap." I lengthened my stride and grinned my way through that last 400.
All six 800 reps in!
Little Victory number 4!
I set the pace to 8:30 and ran the last 3/4's of a mile to get me to six miles for the morning. That little bit put me at 11 miles for the week. Which means I have two more days (tomorrow is a rest day for the legs) to get in 10 miles which will put me over 20 miles for the week. And that will get me ANOTHER Little Victory!!
Dude, I'm so fired up it's funny.
Even though I'm not all that strong lung-wise right now, and I've missed two weeks of training, I still got in a full, real workout that my legs are feeling tonight as I write this. And that will pay off Saturday when I got out to run, and pay off again next week when I hit the short hills again.
This morning's workout had pieces built in that would be easy to hit, too. Those easy to hit targets gave me reasons to celebrate along the way, built my confidence and helped me succeed in my goal for the morning: 6 x 800's averaging below 3:15.
And that's important for the long range goals, too.
We've all got the big goal out there. Now figure out some progression goals to work into your plan that will help you reach your big goal. Then make sure at least some of those progression goals are easy. Ridiculously easy. So there's no way you can make excuses and you'll form the habits that will get you to your big goal. And celebrate those Little Victories every time you reach one.
That will build your confidence, which builds your enthusiasm, which will carry you to success.
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