A Little Suffering

It's been more than a week since my last post, and I was thinking about that statement I made:  "This means I have to do some real work, and experience some suffering, if I am going to get back in reasonably good condition again." 

One of the earliest lessons I learned about running was that in order to get faster you have to do some training, and that training puts a runner out of the usual comfort zone and into the area of suffering.  There isn't anything wrong with simply running every day, at the same pace and distance.  Running like that has plenty of benefits.  But I remember standing at the finish line of our local 5-K many years ago with Coach Richard Smith, who at the time coached cross country for Highlands School.  "I'd like to be able to run a little faster," I admitted, as we were watching runners finish the race.  "If you want to run faster, you have to train faster.  You have to do speedwork," he said.  So I began to learn about interval training, from him and from other runners in our running club like Morris Williams (who is reaping the benefits of grueling hill repeats these days).  It is not easy to do this kind of running, physically or mentally, but it never fails to pay off.

Keep in mind that there is a distinction between pain and suffering.  I used to admire those T-shirts that brave young boys would sport at races that said, "Pain is weakness leaving your body!"  Those are the slogans you use when you have never been injured.  Real pain is your body telling you to slow down, or stop.  Suffering, on the other hand, can be endured.  And those of us who do speedwork on a regular basis suffer through it because the results are almost magical.  Week after week, those interval times become faster and faster, maybe only by a second or two, but there is definite progress.

My commitment to running intervals was reinforced when the daily motivational quotation I receive from Runner's World arrived in my in box today:

Suffer on,  fellow runners!