Forget New Years resolutions.
In fact, forget New Years.
This year, the MARCH is scheduled to be ending 28 hours of long haul with an ETA in NZ of 11.50pm on New Years eve! Whether its baggage reclaim or a holding pattern above Auckland airport we wont be toasting a new healthy, training infused year as the clock chimes 12.
Which brings us to Boxing Day and Bob – and when long and slow needs to be longer and slower….
Lets hear what Camo has to say about all this:
“Resolve your aspirations, and dare to dream, on Boxing Day. New Years eve is always a disappointment and it seems to me, the wrong context to be making a resolution with any future. In truth, New Years eve resolutions are a lament for a year of failed objectives – they don’t ever mark a new beginning. Boxing Day is different. Christmas is still a warm glow and you feel like you’re getting the jump on the rest of the globe. Less a guilty lament and more a happy Boxing Day bounce. For me it’s the perfect time to crack out a quick energy charged run and sort out your plans.…
Boxing Day over the years has been fertile ground for running and planning. Slogging through a snow storm some years, rain others. 2012 was pretty easy. Overcast but relatively mild in a London winter kind of way.
Turning on the iPod, the ACDC track reminded me of my last guilt charged effort. Running a quick 2,200 stairs on Christmas Eve. Not impressive – just a sop to the realisation I had none nothing whatsoever for 2 weeks. Sure, I’d been sick and the 4 week old baby had been even sicker – translating into an evening of crying – before a night of crying - but you know, there’s always a reason – I’d rather not need one!
Looking for something a little more chilled, I plucked for Bob Marley. And you know what? I felt the groove. Pegging down the street Bob’s reggae mood was making sense. Maybe I should be taking things slower…?
The beauty of never having had a training programme is never really knowing what went wrong. Far easier to blame the absence of structure – and sometimes the absence of training itself – than admit to some personal failure. But through the reggae haze Bob was reminding me of something I had read somewhere – something buried away in defiance of the wisdom of others – others who knew what they were doing.
A claim that most long, slow, runs were not long enough or slow enough. And that equally, most short, fast, runs were not short enough or fast enough. If one was to dare to have a training programme…it seemed my approach of smashing myself to pieces on every occasion and then nursing the resulting injuries, long lay off and shorter training sessions might not be ideal….
Now, in the Bob induced cruise that was this years Boxing Day run, the translation seemed pretty sweet. Splicing out the better half of the equation, it seemed to me that to achieve more, you need to actually do less! Push less hard on the long runs and go less far on the fast runs!! Genius.
So that’ll be me. My perfect Boxing Day resolution and my perfect new anti training programme. Doing less really is going to be more!”
Well, we’re not sure whether Camo’s logic quite reflects the approach of the best honed elite athletes out there, but then that really is the point of adventure racing. It’s about having an adventure, however you choose to race!
