5 miles in 33:20 on the treadmill – was not as good a run as it sounds – had to keep forcing myself to stop grabbing the rails.

Today’s post is me tattling on myself for cheating a bit on the treadmill. Consider what is written below as me writing “I will not…” lines on the chalk board…

I was in a training course all day today and my legs were pretty stiff from sitting all day and from the miles I put in on the weekend, but I knew I wanted to really push tonight with the speed.

I started off well – managed to work through the kinks fairly quickly while doing some interval runs – I deliberately started off slower knowing that my legs weren’t going to be top notch. I then got into some good speed intervals started to settle in to push hard. But I found I was not paying attention as I should have been because I was reviewing the course material for the day in my head. There were a couple times I kind of refocused on what I was doing and found I would have my hand resting on the rail to steady myself. Or I would let my hand linger too long on the pistol grip with the speed controls when I would change my speed, taking some of the burden off my legs. Essentially I was cheating. Crap.

Pushing your limits is the whole idea of running or exercising in general but if you are going to cheat there really isn’t much point. In running the only person you are cheating is yourself.

So my lessons for myself here to prevent that from happening again on speed work days:

1. If I am distracted, either get focused properly and concentrate on what I am doing or move the speed work to another day. If you can’t get over whatever the problem is after a few tries then change your plan – marathon training plans take time and you have some flexibility on how you move things around to suit your needs.
2. If I find I am tempting myself to hold on a little too long or I am trying to lean on the rails – I need to straighten up and push harder…and if that doesn’t work I need to admit I am not there yet or maybe I am just not there that day. So back off and try again the next time. The only benefit of cheating yourself is a slightly different number on a piece of paper or on a spreadsheet while the benefits of doing it properly are huge.

Now I am not saying I cheated the whole run – because I certainly didn’t. I only caught myself a couple times with probably only a minor impact on my final numbers for the day but it could be a slippery slope and considering the amount of my running I do on the treadmill, even a little bit of cheating here and there will add up. So I want to make sure I nip that in the bud before it gets too far.

I wanted to do this post because part of the whole reason of doing this blog was to keep myself accountable to my training plan and to my goals. I am going to be mighty pissed at myself if I have to come back on the blog and admit I did it again!