The Complaining Brain
The thing about having a month-long streak of good runs is that you know at some point, the hammer is going to fall. You'll go along with week after week feeling great, then WHAM!, you go out one day and feel anything but indestructible.
When I first started doing ultras, I didn't know one very important thing: when you start to struggle physically, your brain will play all kinds of tricks on you to make you stop. That's a good thing, in general (self-preservation and all), but you almost need to develop a meta-awareness of what your brain is doing when you're struggling.
"Why don't we stop and rest?" it'll tell you. "Boy, that shade sure looks nice!" it points out. But the harder you try to push, the more insidious the taunts become: "Why are you out here?" it'll say. "This is stupid. Why do you have to run so far?" You develop an internal dialog with yourself, and if you engage in that level of dialog, you start to think that your brain has a good point.
I've figured out that lots of ultrarunners develop the ability to see right through those tricks that the brain is playing...in fact, I think it's one of the key skills that long distance runners develop...the ability to recognize it's only the 'basic' brain telling us to stop. You have to learn how to cut it out like chatter on a CB radio.
Ultrarunners develop an ability to evaluate how 'bad' they're really doing, in spite of the what the 'basic' brain is yelling. The 'basic' brain says stop!, but the 'higher' brain takes that as input and continues with a cooler evaluation of the whole system.
The 'trick' (and I hate that word), is to develop and strengthen the 'higher' brain and recognize the input of the 'basic' brain as akin to the complaints of a squirmy kid on a long car ride. "Can't we stop?" "Are we there yet?"
When you finish a difficult run, (and you always finish, somehow), the entire brain can evaluate what went wrong. In my case, it was easy. Friday, I did a hard 9-miler mid-day (a day I usually take off) in the heat, went to a wedding that lasted until 3:30am where I had to stand around in hard shoes, started my run at 10:30am without breakfast, on the first "hot" day of the year, then ran hard the first four miles uphill to keep up with a friend who was riding a bike. That's enough to tip the balance, and I struggled the last 5 miles out of my 'rest week' 19 mile long run. I laid down on a picnic table for 10 minutes at around mile 15, but that was OK. I built up a little toughness, and remembered that you have to do things the right way. At Badwater, the margin for error is quite thin, and if you were to make even a couple of those mistakes on race day, you might be in for a hard time. Long runs are rehearsals. You want to make your mistakes then.
I added some pictures from our Death Valley Easter trip. My friends Steve & Diana, Ken & Jeanne & Will, and the pooch Libby, who faints unless she gets a dose of viagra every 5 hours. (It's a circulation thing.) Pictures include Badwater Basin, the Devil's Golf Course (salt formations), Mushroom Rock, wildflowers, and Sand Dunes:
http://www.theminters.com/events/dv-mar-2005/pages/badwater-basin-bw-final.htm
Oh, and for those keeping a scorecard, I missed weigh-in last week because of D.V. But here are my numbers from this morning:
Starting weight: 206.5
Current weight: 198.0 (-8.5)
Long run: 19
Last week's miles: 55
I should be kicking it up to around 70 miles/week in April, so we'll see how the old bod holds out for that!
When I first started doing ultras, I didn't know one very important thing: when you start to struggle physically, your brain will play all kinds of tricks on you to make you stop. That's a good thing, in general (self-preservation and all), but you almost need to develop a meta-awareness of what your brain is doing when you're struggling.
"Why don't we stop and rest?" it'll tell you. "Boy, that shade sure looks nice!" it points out. But the harder you try to push, the more insidious the taunts become: "Why are you out here?" it'll say. "This is stupid. Why do you have to run so far?" You develop an internal dialog with yourself, and if you engage in that level of dialog, you start to think that your brain has a good point.
I've figured out that lots of ultrarunners develop the ability to see right through those tricks that the brain is playing...in fact, I think it's one of the key skills that long distance runners develop...the ability to recognize it's only the 'basic' brain telling us to stop. You have to learn how to cut it out like chatter on a CB radio.
Ultrarunners develop an ability to evaluate how 'bad' they're really doing, in spite of the what the 'basic' brain is yelling. The 'basic' brain says stop!, but the 'higher' brain takes that as input and continues with a cooler evaluation of the whole system.
The 'trick' (and I hate that word), is to develop and strengthen the 'higher' brain and recognize the input of the 'basic' brain as akin to the complaints of a squirmy kid on a long car ride. "Can't we stop?" "Are we there yet?"
When you finish a difficult run, (and you always finish, somehow), the entire brain can evaluate what went wrong. In my case, it was easy. Friday, I did a hard 9-miler mid-day (a day I usually take off) in the heat, went to a wedding that lasted until 3:30am where I had to stand around in hard shoes, started my run at 10:30am without breakfast, on the first "hot" day of the year, then ran hard the first four miles uphill to keep up with a friend who was riding a bike. That's enough to tip the balance, and I struggled the last 5 miles out of my 'rest week' 19 mile long run. I laid down on a picnic table for 10 minutes at around mile 15, but that was OK. I built up a little toughness, and remembered that you have to do things the right way. At Badwater, the margin for error is quite thin, and if you were to make even a couple of those mistakes on race day, you might be in for a hard time. Long runs are rehearsals. You want to make your mistakes then.
D.V. Pictures
I added some pictures from our Death Valley Easter trip. My friends Steve & Diana, Ken & Jeanne & Will, and the pooch Libby, who faints unless she gets a dose of viagra every 5 hours. (It's a circulation thing.) Pictures include Badwater Basin, the Devil's Golf Course (salt formations), Mushroom Rock, wildflowers, and Sand Dunes:
http://www.theminters.com/events/dv-mar-2005/pages/badwater-basin-bw-final.htm
Oh, and for those keeping a scorecard, I missed weigh-in last week because of D.V. But here are my numbers from this morning:
Starting weight: 206.5
Current weight: 198.0 (-8.5)
Long run: 19
Last week's miles: 55
I should be kicking it up to around 70 miles/week in April, so we'll see how the old bod holds out for that!
posted by Greg Minter at 11:56 AM
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