I sense that I may have used the same headliner before in a post. I woke up on the later side – I was surprised at how tired I had been last night – and still more so when I got on the treadmill.
Sometimes, it is important to listen to the body. Even after twenty odd minutes, I couldn’t take the speed dial beyond a point. I felt as if I was stretching myself already and I stayed within reasonable limits of playing with the dials.
It makes me think – what makes a run hard? I would categorise today as hard but the basic statistics of pace, speed and time wouldn’t reveal that. Perhaps if I had the watch heart rate function switched on or wore a WHOOP, maybe that would tell me where I am at. That’s not me. Pace and time is enough.
I have tried those functions at Whoop and Garmin. For me, the good old RPE is enough – a simplified version – checking in on myself. Today I was nowhere in performance and just exhausted.
Other times, at the hardest of intervals or races, it is both possible to feel a nine or at near maximum effort and yet feel like a million bucks, especially afterwards. Of course, every athlete, amateur to professional knows this. Perhaps humans know this intrinsically in other ways too.
This, I find to be fascinating.
Writing about Running 