Welcome to the final part in this “want to get faster?” series I accidentally started two weeks ago.
And while I genuinely think this final step is the most important…
I also pretty much guarantee you’re not going to like it.
Because the topic is “patience.”
When it comes to getting faster, sometimes it just takes longer than you want it to take.
Sometimes the answer isn’t hidden within a perfect workout and an ideal fueling strategy.
Sometimes the answer is just “I haven’t been doing this sport long enough for this goal to be realistic.”
The the tough part?
You won’t really know until you try.
You won’t know if a 2-hour goal is realistic for your first half until you start training and see how the workouts feel.
Hell, you might not know until race day, when you’re on pace for 10 miles and then flame out spectacularly, having to walk the last 3.
And that sucks.
By then, you’ve become really invested in the goal and it was “going so well” and you’re going to spend weeks asking yourself what you could’ve done differently.
You’ll question whether you did enough speed training.
You’ll wonder if you could have fueled better.
You’ll berate yourself for taking 20 seconds to pee (even though you missed the goal by 20 minutes).
And while all of those things could have played a factor…
It’s also possible you just needed more time.
You might have needed another couple of months to build a solid base of running before really starting to train for the race.
Or maybe you just needed a practice race so you could build the skill a little bit before really going for it.
No matter what, the answer is just patience.
Running is a skill.
Racing is a skill.
Beyond all of the physical stuff like training and fueling and hydration and whatever else – sometimes you just need a little more time to practice.
This past weekend, I was talking with one of the people I train at the gym.
He’s a pretty accomplished local ultrarunner, finishing the Wasatch 100 over 10 times.
All of his finishes were under 30 hours and his fastest finish was under 24.
Yet he actually ran the course 11 times.
And the first time, he didn’t technically finish.
Because he crossed the finish line 90 seconds after the cutoff.
Why?
Because he spent a ton of time meandering through the Wasatch mountains with a paper map, trying not to get lost (this was over 20 years ag,o before we had all the fancy GPS stuff).
So he DNF’d.
It wasn’t a physical training issue.
It wasn’t a skill issue.
It was just an issue of not knowing the course very well.
He needed to run it once.
And the only way to do that was to do it.
Sometimes, we just don’t really know what’s going to happen out there.
We can do all the research and preparation and still have a bad race just because these things take time.
I was talking to a college coach the other day and he referred to his freshmen as “babies in the sport.”
Some of these kids are scholarship athletes who’d been running competitively all through high school.
All of them are so much faster than I will ever be.
Yet that’s still how he thinks about them.
And to be clear, it wasn’t derogatory.
It’s just how he thinks of anybody who hasn’t been doing the sport at least five years.
Yet most of us follow a 3-month training plan we found on the internet and wonder why we aren’t magically hitting all of our race goals.
Short answer – it takes time.
We can expedite progress through proper training and recovery and nutrition and all of the other things I discussed in this series.
But sometimes the answer is just time.
As a person who hates being patient, I’m not a fan of that answer.
Yet sometimes that’s the answer.
Patience.
I hope you enjoyed this “Want to get faster?” series and found some of the topics helpful.
If you ever have any questions or want to talk about your own training, you know how to reach me.