Runner Commandment #7: . The faster you are the less you should talk about your times.

fitness

By Paul Pajo

If you’re into posting your times and PRs on Log Your Run, Daily Mile or even via RunKeeper – you’ll find out that you were probably very enthusiastic about your PRs when you were just a beginner runner. You were probably having PRs in almost every race and then somewhere in the middle of the year, you experience a plateau. Maybe you even have a few bad races where you just woke up at the wrong side of the bed and you have a race time that’s ten percent slower than your PR. You tweak things around – maybe you buy a new shoe, you to a running clinic, you join a faster running group, you change your nutrition or you start doing cross-training and some weight lifting and maybe even some plyometrics. The result is that you’re again doing a lot of PRs at the end of they year. As a result of your exuberance and excitement from breaking through a seeming impasse in your beginner runner year, you share your times with your running friends.

You realize now that your experience is totally different from what they’ve gone through or that they are at a different season in their running. You actually recognize yourself when they talk about their running injuries and how they were sideline for a few weeks and that they had to start from scratch again and have to gather mileage for short distance races that would have been an easy run for them a few months back. Some of your friends who had better PRs than you in the full marathon are now just happy to be able to run a very slow 10K on their training runs.

What happened? Running happened. YOU can probably relate to whatever your running friends are going through now because you did go through them yourself although now you have some sense of perspective of what they can do about it. And this is where you need to be conscious of other people’s sensibilities and sensitivities. It’s pain enough to know that even though you want to run a longer route or even a faster 10K that you can’t do it because it might aggravate your running injury. The hard part is that you have to listen to people talk about how fast they have become and although you’d want to comment on it – you can’t. You can’t comment because even if you mention your fast times, the last time you ran that fast was a few months ago. You remember now how irritated you were when younger people than you would keep going on and on and on over Facebook chat about how they were going to do a break their personal record for a full marathon and your time is like an hour and a half slower them. And then, it a flash of nostalgia, you remember that you’ve seen and heard of this before -and you secretly wished that your friend who keeps on talking about how fast they’ve become would just not talk about it at the moment.

A good way to not be tempted about fast times in races is to find another metric to talk about — why not try hear rates? Ask around what are the maximum and average heart rates of you group and expect to get blank looks if they didn’t use heart rate monitors during training. You can now go off-tangent from the conversations by extolling the benefits of having a heart rate base training program. You’ll notice after a while that the runners who have been around the block a few more times than you are the same people that you find in the Top 100 of your age bracket every time you download the race results from the running websites. You figure out soon enough that there seems to be an inverse relationship between how much a runner will talk about their race times versus how old they are. There might be exceptions to this rule but running for years on end should bring a maturity to how you present running to new runners. While race times are indeed recorded, that doesn’t mean that it should be center of the topic all the time. What is unique about a particular run? The answer to that question might surprise you – running is not entirely about how fast you run but might be more about the little adventures that happen to us in the course of our running.