Knowing can be twice the battle

When I was a kid I loved watching GI Joe. Every episode ended with a special message to help you move on to your day, and each message ended with the GI Joe character saying ". . . and Knowing is half the battle." It wasn't until this year's training that I actually think that knowing can make it twice the battle.

About a year ago I was in the middle of my 18 week training for my first marathon. I remember looking ahead to CrazyLegs and wanting to use that as a benchmark for my training. My goal was to run CrazyLegs in 35 minutes, I more or less did it: result (type in griego), and then I ran seven miles home. I didn't know what I didn't know, but that wasn't going to stop me because I knew how hard I worked. Fast forward to today and I feel about the opposite. I know that I can complete distances I never thought attainable so if I'm tired or not feeling 100% it makes it that much harder to get up and do the training that needs to be done. Lately, my excuse is how cold it's been. I've gotten burned out on the 9 degree, or colder, morning runs. I have about 8 weeks to get off this excuse machine and finish strong.

There's a reason kids are so resilient, they don't know not to be. It takes a special person to train at a high level for any distance race and those of us who aren't at that level either have to decide that training is a fantastic way to get in shape and stay in shape and that races are just the icing on the cake, or we have to realize that we can keep making improvements but we can't let our successes slow down our growth.