The experts on training and running will tell you to get the little things right: to optimise recovery, nutrition, training and sleep.
However, optimising and getting used to having things close to perfect a lot of the time can make you a worry wart and collapse into a pool of silliness when things start to go wrong.
Take sleep, for example.
Say you organise your life to get fantastic sleep most nights. The day you don’t get it — likely to be the day you most need it — you worry excessively that you won’t be up to the task. If you’re used to not always getting a good night sleep and doing whatever it is you have to do regardless, you’ll worry less (and perhaps sleep better as a result).
And there’s another problem. The things you do to optimise sleep can make it harder to sleep when everything doesn’t fall into place and when you will probably most need to sleep as well as you can despite the circumstances.
If you need a totally dark and quiet room at the right temperature while wearing earplugs next to someone who doesn’t snore too much, you will have a crisis the day you don’t have these things.
In fact, when you don’t have much stress, you should actually be training yourself to get by in not perfect conditions.
This applies to everything else — nutrition, recovery and training.
Of course, the main thing about running training is to avoid injury. So you don’t want to skimp on optimising in that area. But don’t worry if everything else doesn’t fall in place every day. It’s a good test and training in itself. Training for real life.
I’m thinking about this a day before an ultra for which I’ll get at best four hours of sleep (I’ll be getting up at 3 am).
Plus, there has been an added stressor with this ultra. With the regional government ramping up the COVID restrictions in the past two days (now we can’t leave our county without a good reason as well as not being able to go out between 10 pm and 6 am), whether the race would go ahead and whether I could do it were both in doubt.
The race will go ahead. Although I’m still not sure whether I’m allowed to go as I’m not a “federated runner”. This is a grey area that the organisers have not been able to give me a straight answer on.
However, it should be okay. Either way, I’m going. I’m decided now, but this has given me an extra thing to worry about and try to sort out over the last couple of days —
sending emails to people, keeping an eye on social media and printing
out forms for if the police pull me over at four in the morning.
As usual, conditions are not ideal. I did my last ultra on less sleep than I’ll get tonight, and I’ve run and done other things countless times in similar conditions.
However, of late I’ve been so lucky with getting things like recovery and sleep right, that it’s a rude shock to be back in the land of stress and little sleep.
So I think in stressless times I should push myself closer to the edge on a regular basis. I also need to do more things in my day. In fact, cramming more things in my day would be the simplest way to add stress when none is coming from external forces.
This would be a blessing in two ways.
First, I’d get more done.
Second, I’d get used to living further away from any state of optimisation. So when life gets in the way at key moments, I’d be much better prepared.
So in the future, less focus on optimising and more on getting things done and mental toughness.
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