If It Doesn’t Kill Me Does It Really Make Me Stronger?
Intervals.
The very word sets my spine a-shivering and my shoulders a-shuddering.
I barely sleep the night before my track workouts.
My mind anticipates the aerobic discomfort, it fears that my paces will fall short of my targets, and it’s certain that I won’t hold my pace across all of the repeats. I’ll hurt, I’ll be slow, and then I’ll fade.
When my alarm tells me it’s time, I linger in bed, exploring every plausible excuse to skip the session. Or at least to choose a different workout. One that doesn’t require an unrelenting effort. If I can’t convince myself to avoid or defer I trudge to the track and start my warm-up with a grim combination of resignation and resentment. I’m sure I look just like my daughters did when I made them pick up after the dog when they were young. And when I can’t delay any longer, I hit the lap button on my Garmin and begin my own personal Hell.
Except that when I’m running the intervals I’m not really suffering. Moving my body at speed feels affirming, and it definitely takes work. But I’m concentrating so much on executing the workout — more intense running with precisely timed recovery — that I can’t do much emotional processing.
Yes, I breathe hard, and I have to concentrate on form because I struggle to run smoothly when my lungs are straining to pull air in before pushing it immediately back out again. And yes, sometimes I’m slow. And I can remember cutting an interval session short a handful of times because my pace flagged. But mostly I hit my pace, and usually all the way through the session.
I don’t have a coach.
There is no one demanding that I run the intervals at all, let alone at the paces I set.
So why do I feel so anxious about interval workouts if I have no one to disappoint when I don’t run my interval workouts correctly?
Well, no one but myself.
And that’s the rub. Perhaps the real source of my performance anxiety is that I expect myself to give more than what I expect from everyone else. I’m no saint to be sure, but I am a generous guy, mostly, and my default is to grant the benefit of any doubt. I assume good intent from others. I ask little of others and I forgive easily, maybe because I believe that I deserve less of the world’s bounty than others.
But I won’t forgive myself when I fall short of my ambitions.
On the one hand, big ambitions are inspiring, and fulfilling them requires mastering complexity, exerting sustained effort, or creating something the world hasn’t seen before. Or all of the above. They often improve our collective marginal utility (I’m still an economist — sue me). On the other hand, big ambitions are by their nature challenging to achieve, and all their moving parts mean that sometimes there are uncontrollable forces that limit success. I grant others the grace of failure in such circumstances, but I won’t cut myself any slack.
Not that interval workouts are big ambitions.
But that lack of slack-cutting comes into play with my smaller ambitions too. (I’m consistent that way.) Plus I know how integral interval training is to my running success. When I bail on my track workouts, I’m bailing on my whole training plan. In the woven fabric of race preparation, if you pull on one thread too hard or too frequently the whole thing unravels.
So the conflict is simple: something that I very much want to achieve depends on me doing something that I don’t like to do because it’s hard and I might fail at it. And when I try to talk my recalcitrant self into doing that hard thing it acts like a petulant little shit with fingers in its ears going la-la-la-la-la-la-la. (I really don’t like that petty little guy, but so far it’s proven impossible to get rid of him.)
And when I manage to finish an interval workout?
Joy. Sheer joy. Liberation-of-Paris-level joy. The kind of joy that comes only from accomplishing something hard, something you weren’t sure you’d be able to pull off.
Plus unfettered relief at putting those goddamn intervals in the rearview mirror. At least for another week, when those fears will come stampeding in again.
