Let’s talk about curiosity.

I was nervous about a specific run in my training plan ever since I saw it pop up on my training log. 20 miles with 4/3/2/1 miles at half marathon effort with one mile easy in between. Whew!

My coach, David Roche, put it in perspective and said, “it’s effort, not pace. You can do 10 miles with rest at half marathon effort since you could do 13.1 miles straight at half marathon effort.” I knew this made sense intuitively and was still super curious about what that half marathon effort would look and feel like 15-20 miles later.

I started this one with sleepy legs and knew once I got about an hour in, we’d be good to go.

The first four miles were already at a pace faster than I ran the fastest segment last week, and I still had six more miles at speed to go. Isn’t that cool; that all of this builds on each other and every week we’re raising the floor, and maybe even the ceiling?

We rolled on, and in the two mile segment hit some insane winds. The last rep was a last-one-fast-one, cruising a 6:30 into the 20th mile. Whoa.

I finished this one with a shit eating grin on my face, having been muttering “let’s fucking go” to myself in the last 800. “Strong, not stupid,” was Ellie Pell’s guidance and I’m so glad we ran into each other in the parking lot this morning.

That ended up being probably my strongest workout ever, and a huge confidence boost 30 days out from CIM. The train rolls on. 

And there is a blog post about a random training run almost as long as the run itself. But more about the importance of curiosity in running, and in life.