Benet Recap from Athlete Perspective

After Saturday’s races at Benet we tried something new as a team, a written reflection on the race with no mention of pace or place, just simply how did your race play out. Here are some excerpts of those reflections. With my comments following each excerpt.

“Running with the pack was amazing, each of us were helping each other.”

                What a great sentiment, the idea that you push each other day in and day out at practice and during the race you can do the same thing. Running is a mental sport, if you are mentally prepared to stick with your teammates at practice it becomes that much easier in a meet.

“I feel that this was some of my best running that I’ve ever done, but I still have room to improve.”

                At this point in the year for most they are starting to sharpen up for conference and do have their best running coming up. This is a classic comment from someone who is both confident in the work that they have done, but also competitive and wanting to get the most out of their body. The mindset of a true champion.

“I feel I really had nothing left when I finished and that always makes me happy.”

                Knowing you left it all out on the course can be an extremely rewarding feeling.

“A bigger thing today was AP Psych. When I really started feeling pain and anxiety, I thought of what’s really going on and thought, ‘your body’s telling you to stop, because it doesn’t know you will be done in a mile.’”

                Taking the classroom into the race, I love it. But it also hits on a key aspect of racing, understanding what it will take for each athlete to “negotiate” with the negative thoughts that slowly creep into your head during the race. Maybe its AP Psych for you, maybe it’s a workout we did last week, maybe it’s the strength from summer miles, maybe its passing people as you run, or maybe it’s the joy of just getting to race. Whatever that is for you if you can start to harness those positive thoughts to outweigh the negative good results will follow.

“I didn’t want to waste my energy catching him too fast, so I just made sure I was constantly gaining a little ground.”

                Tremendous running advice. If you hit a bad patch, find yourself out the back of the pack, you fall down, get tripped, whatever. The most important thing: Don’t Panic! Allow yourself to mentally refocus on the task at hand and understand you have time to recover, and as you do make sure you can respond to difficulty.