"Pushing too hard doesn’t always pay"

Chivito550

I think this could be a good discussion. Here's a great piece by Sonia O'Sullivan. She talks about the difference between her disappointment in Atlanta and her success in Sydney. For Atlanta it was all tunnel vision towards a far distant goal, and a strive for perfection. For Sydney, she was out injured for 8 weeks at the end of 1999, and as a result focused on smaller more immediate goals.

http://www.irishtimes.com/sport/sonia-o-sullivan-pushing-too-hard-doesn-t-always-pay-1.2487258

I think so many of us here, regardless of what level we compete at, are guilty of getting bogged down on a long term goal, and it can consume us. I know it did for me.

Has anybody experienced something similar to what Sonia talks about? What lessons did you learn from it?

adrian522

Read that this morning, thinking, "I wish I'd read that this time last year"

Some Kind of Wizard

Article is also on Quote of the Day section of LetsRun. Myself, I find every time I get back from injury I think too long term and start pushing too hard too early, resulting in injury again. This time I'm taking it slowly with no long term goals in mind.

Chivito550

Some Kind of Wizard wrote: »

Article is also on Quote of the Day section of LetsRun. Myself, I find every time I get back from injury I think too long term and start pushing too hard too early, resulting in injury again. This time I'm taking it slowly with no long term goals in mind.

I hear ya. Thanks to this article I am not setting any goals for the moment, except recovering fully from this injury.

BeepBeep67

What I've learned over the years is that it can be counterproductive to always have a goal on the horizon. I've changed my cycles to step back from time to time. That doesn't mean stop training (I ran 346 / 365 days last year), but I can have weeks / months of running without a particular race in mind and I'll have a rough mileage target to aim at, but no strict or rigid means of achieving that.

Some days I'll run faster, but I won't be a slave to intervals, more tempo and progression type efforts, but mainly I'm running because I enjoy it, not because I'm training to knock 5 seconds of my 5k time.
I'll still jump into a race, but will go in with the expectation that I'm not race sharp and get spanked from time to time by someone I shouldn't. But that's ok, the race has a purpose, a good workout that probably couldn't be recreated on a cold Weds night on my own.

The benefit for me I feel is that I've exited the year in good shape and form and feel relaxed, recovered and in the right mental frame of mind to enter into a solid focused block of training.

Time will tell!

Timmaay

BeepBeep67 wrote: »

What I've learned over the years is that it can be counterproductive to always have a goal on the horizon. I've changed my cycles to step back from time to time. That doesn't mean stop training (I ran 346 / 365 days last year), but I can have weeks / months of running without a particular race in mind and I'll have a rough mileage target to aim at, but no strict or rigid means of achieving that.

Some days I'll run faster, but I won't be a slave to intervals, more tempo and progression type efforts, but mainly I'm running because I enjoy it, not because I'm training to knock 5 seconds of my 5k time.
I'll still jump into a race, but will go in with the expectation that I'm not race sharp and get spanked from time to time by someone I shouldn't. But that's ok, the race has a purpose, a good workout that probably couldn't be recreated on a cold Weds night on my own.

The benefit for me I feel is that I've exited the year in good shape and form and feel relaxed, recovered and in the right mental frame of mind to enter into a solid focused block of training.

Time will tell!

Not too dissimilar here ha, I've a decent few targets in mind for the year, and I'll do my best to achieve them, but I rarely let any of them targets go to my head, there is absolutely always another day ha!