The Long Awaited Burn.

First track workout of the year accomplished last night and so the lung burning begins. Took it nice and easy with a 6 x 800m workout sandwiched inside of a 10 mile easy run. Outside of a couple of short tempo runs that last fews weeks I have had a hard time motivating myself to get to the track for intervals. Last night Chris and I finally bit the bullet and started the progression towards Beantown, about 12 weeks away. I like track workouts for two reasons:

1. The more quality track workouts or hard intervals I do, the more fluid I feel running hard for long periods of time. Don't know if there is any correlation there, but it certainly makes me feel more efficient if I have a few workouts under my belt.
2. The mental challenge of the track. Sure, 6 x 800m goes by pretty quickly, but come March when I am starring a longer workout in the grill, the mental aspect of trying to hit the same splits for say, 10 x 800m, is more of an epic mental struggle with your mind to keep pushing. Sure, it's easy to bag it at 8 because you are tired of running around in circles, but imagine how much better you will feel if you finish all 10.

So in summary, in my un-expert opinion, I believe mental toughness is half the battle for endurance racing. Your mind can be a demon at mile 22 of a marathon or halfway through the run at a half Ironman or Ironman. It's almost like a cartoon you used to watch as a kid where there is a little red devil sitting on your shoulder telling you that if you just slow down it won't hurt nearly as bad. In my experience, once I slow down, it's hard to start pushing again, so why not just weather the storm and push harder?

Back to the track it is next week. It will be a steady mix between track and speed intervals, long tempo runs and long runs from here on out. Missed the swim today due to work obligations, but that is all something I have to take into account with my scattered job. One day I'm in Texas, another I'm traveling to odd projects, and sometimes I'm in Charlotte. Each week tends to bring a different adventure and balancing that with training is all part of it.