This hasn’t been an easy year for motivation for me. The combination of travel, life stress, the uncertainty of a new sport (trail running), and business of work has made it hard to feel compelled to do all the training necessary for success. The running is always easy for me, but it was tough to convince myself that I needed to get on the stationary bike for 3 hours, when I didn’t have any races in the foreseeable future. I still got it done, but it took so much mental energy–it was exhausting.
Now, I have some races on the schedule and cross training no longer seems like an arduous chore, but an important training tool. The irony is that it always had the same impact on my fitness, but I view it differently when there’s a fitness test on the calendar. Even if the race is in 8 months, or the distance seems too ambitious, or it’s just a small local race–I think there is merit in having something to train toward and structure workouts around. It gives every training session more purpose, and helps light that fire around the particularly difficult or tedious parts of training. So sign up for that race!
Watch the video below to see how having races on the schedule increased my enthusiasm for training.
