It's all relative

I won't try and convince you I know everything about Einstein's Theory of Relatively but I once heard it described as this: if you spend an hour with a pretty girl, it passes in what seems to be minutes; if you burn your hand on the stove, minutes feel like hours.

This makes a lot of sense in running and distance training. The more you don't focus on running, or whatever you're doing, the more you're relaxed and the quicker, relatively speaking, the time passes. My most recent example of this was last Sunday. I had the opportunity to run with a friend. We met up at my mile 1.5, he had already done a couple miles, so we were looking to do about 6 together. Those 6 miles breezed by. Then we broke off and I finished up my run alone. As well as with so many other sports I've done, the more I get caught up in thinking about everything I have to do, it seems to make it so much harder. Basketball; if I keep missing shots I start analyzing and trying to figure out if my elbows out of place or I'm not using my legs enough. I have to realize that if I've spent the hours training at the activity my body knows what to do a whole lot better than I do; so let it do it.

To piggy-back on that last thought; my body is way smarter than me. In fact, my body is never wrong. My body is reactive; if I start running fast and check my heart rate monitor, my heart rate doesn't go up immediately in conjunction with my speed, it slowly ticks up and at the time I look and see my heart rate is getting too high, I slow down, but my heart rate hasn't peaked yet, it's still rising. That's when I know I could be in trouble, especially if I'm at mile 15 of a marathon.

Closing thought: heart rate monitors, gps watches; they are all fantastic training tools and reference tools when in a race. But there is a lot to be said for 'knowing' what different speeds and heart rates 'feel' like. Usually when people are checking their watch towards the end of the race, it's almost a panic; the legs are mush, every step is a struggle, yet they keep looking at the heart rate monitor expecting it to show something that's not there. For the last 3 miles of the Community First Fox Cities Marathon my heart rate was dropping. That sounds great, but it was because I was going slower and as hard as I tried my body wasn't letting me go any faster; but I kept checking that watch thinking that it was going to offer something meaningful to help push me to the end. . . but it didn't, the last three miles were purely me telling myself a great quote a friend said while running the last mile of his first half marathon "I didn't pay $50 to walk!"