Monday 23 November 2009

Begin at the beginning and go on till you come to the end: then stop

There are many phrases, all harking to the same sound; keep at it, one step at a time, day in day out, you can...

But it all comes down to the same principle...

Work hard, very hard in fact.

Do the very best you can each day and don't let things get to you. If you stick at it for long enough, through the crap and the rubbish and all the associated aches and pains...it will pay off.

It might be in a year or it might be in ten, no one can tell you when. But what you can know for sure is it will pay off, down the line, probably when you least expect it.

...And it will all be worth it, a million times over.

Quite a simple principle really, just keep your head down and don't give up.

How putting it into words can make it sound so easy!

Now of course I am relating this to sport but it goes for everything across the board, it's just I'm learning these lessons through my sport, I am very grateful for that. It takes a medium to learn lessons through and sport is a great are to learn about life. I feel as if I am only a few miles into the marathon, but my legs are feeling good and the sun is out. If I keep it up it might end up being a good run.

As they say...one step at a time.

OK that is my weekly cliche fix over with, it's healthy for me to get it out.

I'm at the end of a few tough months well and truly into the winter. The sun set today before 4 and it's definitely chilly outside, I've ventured out on more than one training session in the past few weeks in my terrifying winter balaclava...


Definitely gives the members of the public a good scare when I storm past.

Anyway I was meant to be writing about my weekend.

I received an email a few months ago from a local runner, Robbie Simpson, of Banchory (10 miles away). Rob's 18 and is already a very well established mountain runner. Of a similar mentality to my own, there's no way to beat the big guys unless you get out there and race them. So he's been out racing the big boys over the past year and hasn't done too badly at all. Top 20 at Junior World Champs in the summer plus a hoard of other top 5 and top 10 results in Senior events all over during the past 12 months.

He also bagged himself a spot on the Saab Salomon Outdoor Team, pretty jealous as Salomon have some wicked cool shoes, you can check out the team page here http://www.saabsalomonoutdoorteam.com/team/robbie-simpson/

Annnyway, as most of you know my running is still in its development stage...so the crazy part of my brain thought it would be fun to head out with him on a training run, 1.5 hours, off road, up hills. Luckily he is a cool dude so I quickly forgot about the sore legs and we had a blast, bashing around the hills and sliding all over the trails. Damn those mountain runners can storm downhill.

Afterwards we headed out on the MTBs for a recovery spin, I even had another ninja mtb skills moment (for a quick refresher on my previous mtb exploits see reference link here http://michaeladams-triathlete.blogspot.com/2009/10/you-wish-you-had-camera.html ) where I managed to skid, drop the bike and launch myself off all in the same millisecond...landing miraculously on my feet a few yards down the path. Good times.


Anyway, the next day Rob entered and won a local trail race...while I was still nursing the sore ankle and quad from the day before. Damn Crazy Runners

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hello mate,

I'm a fellow triathlete a little further down the curve from you. I was writing to ask you about your swimming and running. In those senses were are probably the direct opposite - I've always competed in athletics, you in swimming. What advice would you have for me to improve quickly?
As you have yourself said, your running is what you're working on. What are your aims for this year? Do you think you'll be able to realistically get it good enough to compete with the top guys in 2010?

Take it easy,

Phil

Michael Adams said...

Hey Phil,

To improve quickly in swimming? Unfortunately the thing with swimming is that it relies very heavily on technique, which comes from spending hours and hours in a pool. My best advice would be to spend as much time as possible (at least 3 or 4 hours a week) in the pool, almost entirely front crawl working on your technique, once you get towads spring time you could start to introduce more and more speed work. As for now though I'd work on steady swimming and drills. FC pull using a pull buoy can be useful as can things like taking 3 strokes then letting the thrid stroke glide out so you extend your hand far out infront of you and hold kicking for about 5seconds. Basically you just need to get comfortable in the water and the speed will come.

For me? All I can do is train as hard as I can, I've seen some of the top guys train and I know I have what it takes to match their training programmes. Thats what I am doing now, whether or not it translates into the racing environment successfully is another story. All I can do is train the best I can every day, if you do that hopefully the racing will take care of itself.

...do I realistically think I'll have my run legs by next summer?

yeh :)

cheers for the comment

mike