Live through your own performances

The Winter Olympics are in full swing and with the event comes shameless nationalistic pride that I feel as strongly as anyone while our athletes are competing. Because the casual fan can grow so accustomed to the favourites performing when it counts at the highest level, any instance of an athlete cracking under the pressure can induce a feeling of deep disappointment or even frustration. This was especially evident for myself four years ago during the Vancouver Games, when pre-games hype and expectations to "Own the Podium" were smashed when the medal haul stagnated in the first week of competition. 

While the Vancouver Games were happening, I was pursuing my own athletic goals, first attempting to break nine minutes for 3000 metres, and then trying to better my time at OUA's. I realized that I should stop focusing on the performances of other athletes and instead prove that I could perform under pressure myself. 

I shut off the television, stopped worrying about how Canada was doing in the medal standings, and broke the nine minute barrier. A week later at OUA's I focused solely on racing my competitors in the "slow" heat and clocked 8:49, in what remains one of the most satisfying performances of my life. 

The lesson I drew from this was that while it's fantastic to cheer our athletes toward victory, their losses shouldn't invoke feelings similar to a minor personal tragedy. As it turned out, the Canadian team got red-hot in the second week and ended up with a record gold-medal haul for a single nation at the Winter Olympics. Certainly I remember Sidney Crosby's winning goal, but the feeling of disbelief looking up at the clock post-race and seeing a time under 8:50-- that moment electrified my entire body. I believe it's best to live through your own performances for this reason.

In training news, I remain consistent from a mileage standpoint, but my workouts have not been earth-shattering. To allow for more recovery, we planned a workout for Wednesday this past week but another storm made footing disastrous and we pushed 6x6 minutes (off a minute jog recovery) to Thursday. I felt terrible on the last two reps, and needed Saturday to be a good day once again to boost my confidence. To that end, Ryan and I ran 20 miles at a quick and steady pace; I felt good until the 18 mile mark when cramping and fatigue made the run more of a slog. That being said, I feel that my endurance is coming along, even if faster pace work is still lagging behind in the adaptation phase. 

The Ideal

Another decent week of mileage is in the rear-view mirror, but the workouts in these past seven days gave me more trouble than I expected. I had to work very hard to stay within 50 metres of my primary training partner on Tuesday's 6x(3min quick+ 1 min surge) up on the McMaster indoor track and was well off goal half-marathon pace during a 4 mile tempo on Thursday. Thankfully a 29 kilometre run with 13k at an estimation of current marathon pace went quite well, thereby salvaging the week somewhat in terms of quality. 

Part of the reason for my lacklustre workouts the past week may have been the residual fatigue that carried over from the week before, and possibly the two hours I spent cross country skiing in the Dundas Valley on Sunday. 

I absolutely love cross country skiing, even if my technique could use some serious tweaking. I've owned a pair of  of classic skis since Christmas 2007 and in all that time have only gone on ungroomed trails/golf courses when the snow has permitted, which altogether has likely been less than 20 times (school work got in the way of many chances the past five years). 

I tend to think the way cross country skiing is broadcast in Canada and the United States during World Cup and Olympic events is the ideal that distance running should strive for. Many of the races are of a similar duration; the men's 50km event at the Vancouver Games took around two hours and five minutes to complete, similar to Sammy Wanjiru's 2:06:32 for the marathon at the Beijing Olympics two years earlier. Yet there is a stark difference in the quality of the commentary, primarily because knowledgable former athletes are often brought in to provide analysis during the ski events while major marathons and long distance track races feature a talking head who has often been prepped more about the materials in a particular athlete's shoe than who the major players for medals are and their history. 

Can this be changed? Absolutely. But it will likely take Canadians and Americans winning consistently on the world stage (again) for networks to take notice and focus more on the compelling story of the race that is unfolding rather than the personal tragedy of some homegrown talent meant to pull at the heartstrings rather than stimulate the minds of viewers.