Running on Empty
Sometimes you have to dig extra deep to find the strength to finish the workout
We’ve all had them: those workouts where you just can’t seem to get out of the blocks, where just showing up is hard enough work. Could be you’re a little under the weather, tired from life’s daily grind or maybe it’s just last night’s burrito burrowing through your bowels. For me, it often happens at the track – or on the way to the track, anticipating 40 minutes of lung-searing hell. If you’re like me, you keep telling yourself you’re not up to it, that you’d be better off running slower and farther.
Your brain keeps working against you during your warm-up. You know there’s no way that body of yours is going to get through six reps of 1,200m. Be lucky to notch two real slow ones.
But you go ahead anyway even though it doesn’t feel good. So you make deals with yourself: if I cut it short at five, I can call it a moral victory because the truth is, I didn’t even have three reps in me. The problem is, you’ve come out with a group and they’re all doing the same workout. And a few months earlier, you broke open the piggy bank and paid to have a coach draw up a plan for you and run these high-intensity workouts.
That’s what I was facing earlier this year when I showed up at the track, convinced I was in for a confidence-busting workout. And I made it so. Planned to bail at five reps. My self-sabotage cost me during the third rep, when I lost count of my laps. Quit one lap early. So did the runner who foolishly relied on me for pace and distance. Two mistakes she’ll never repeat. “Coach,” I said. “That’s it. Got nothing today. Gonna cut it short.” And I started to walk towards my stuff, ready to peel that sweaty shirt off my body.
“Oh no you won’t.” She stopped me dead in my tracks. Her tone said I’d be running those last two reps if she had to grab me by the throat, carve “quitter” across my chest and drag me around the oval like a medieval chicken thief on the way to the gallows.
It would be a good story if I said her words so riled me that I dug so deep into myself that I found a reserve I thought never existed, propelling me to my two best 1,200m reps ever, collapsing at the end of it, so spent that I couldn’t talk for two minutes.
And it might be a more entertaining story if I said that even though I really didn’t have it in me that day, I managed to barely gut out two slow reps before being overcome by the worst case of track hack and leaving my burrito in the bleachers.
The truth: well, it’s somewhere in between. I finished the workout – neither with a f lourish nor with a whimper. But I did finish, and I did hold my pace. Which just goes to show that sometimes, even when you think you’re running on empty, you just might be able to find enough in yourself to do better than you thought you could. Especially when coach forces you to do two penalty laps for forgetting how to count.