Life is about balance.

The give and the take.

The Ying and the Yang.

Hot and the Cold

Without balance our lives would be more chaotic than they already are now.   Balancing time for ourselves, our friends, our family, and our training.   Ignore one at the expense of the other and things suffer.

Balance.

The same is true when it comes to our training.   As I said the other day in my post How Slow Can You Go, I have embraced the going slower approach to my training.   But there has to be a balance to this approach for it to work.

Balance is the key.

Run too fast too often and you will end up injured or burnt out.

Never running fast and you will never improve.

Balance.

So even though most days I am not running faster than a 10:40 pace, there are days that I’m out there pushing it. Today was such a day.  These are the days that you have to bring your A game to.    These are the days that make up for all the “slower” days.

Yes, I take notes as when I’m pushing it sometimes my brain needs a little help.   That being said, I am pretty happy with the way this cut down turned out.   I haven’t done one in a while and this one was not meant to be an easy run.   I guess that’s what happens when you have a good race.  Your coach adjusts your cut down paces accordingly even if it made you cry a little when you saw it.  That being said, it also wasn’t meant to be I need to stop right now run either.    At the end, I was supposed to feel like I could run another mile at the pace I was running.   I will say that although, I do think I could have kept going at mile 5 that I was more than happy to slow down.

Moral of the story is as much as you need to run slow to speed up, you also need days like this too.

The Ying and the Yang.

The give and the take.

The slow running days and the run like hell days.

It’s all about balance.