Mental strategies for challenging solo workouts
We’ve all been there. The tough workout that’s just not cooperating with you. The legs won’t fire, the breathing is going through the roof and you’re just getting started. But you remind yourself, if this were easy everyone would be doing it and you keep your head down, right….? Well sort of.
Sometimes no matter our best intention the workout is just no coming along as we’d like. Maybe it was a long day at work, poor sleep, a missed lunch or just cumulative fatigue that’s wearing on you. Yesterday I found myself in this boat (it certainly wasn’t the first time) and I had to pull out all of my little head tricks to get the job done. It was a challenging set of 2x3mi tempo intervals on town lake trail. Coming off a hard ride in the AM, I knew they’d be tough but I was excited to give them a shot. The goal was 5:30-5:40 pace and, if feeling good, pushing the last mile down to 5:20…. We’ll it didn’t quite start out that way, instead of starting out at the slower end of the range and working down, my sense of pacing was waaay off and I came through the first mile in 5:23…oops. While that split might feel gratifying I knew right away it was going to make the next 5mi that much harder and it did. I was able to finish that first 3mi effort with 5:35’s but the 2nd set was going to be questionable…
[…]