Recently I have been the busiest that I have ever been in my life, it makes for somewhat challenging coordination of life in general. This once again brings out the theme of this blog, the challenge of balance in life. I have found it very difficult to find all the time that I want to train adequately ( at least what I think is adequate) and also find the time to spend with my lovely wife and daughter. The massive time consumer in my life right now that seems to be proportionately out of balance is school. PA school is a beast, never in my life have I worked so hard to just stay above the failing line. I am the type of person that is somewhat unaccustomed to failure, I am not saying that I don't or haven't but normally I put in the effort and work to excel in most all that I do. Given that mindset, I find it very motivating, and a little discouraging, to be putting in a maximum effort and barely getting by. I think that it teaches a kind of mental toughness that will help through all aspects of my life, it also makes the big successes that much sweeter.
I mentioned that I felt my training had been getting a little neglected, this isn't entirely true. I'll admit that I haven't been able to reach my weekly mileage goals quite as readily as I had hoped, but because of my limited amount of time I have been forced to focus on the quality of the work outs. I have to mention, because I don't have any where else to, that I hit a couple of big PR's this week. Given that I didn't run track in high school or college I have never been a real fast runner, as a matter of fact I feel like overall I am pretty slow, I just seem to be able to suffer really good. But this week I had to run an errand during my typical training time that was 1.5 miles from school, so I thought let's see how fast I can run it... turns out I am not super slow, on the way there I ran a 8:15 and back I ran a 8:30. Recently I have been seeing good improvement overall in my general pace, so I felt pretty good with the effort. Part of this desire to find what hidden speed I might have comes from spending most of last weekend watch the Simplot Games and seeing some very impressive High School indoor track. I was able to sneak in a run with Ty Draney, an amazingly talented athlete from Star Valley, who was down coaching is HS track team. We beat up on each other a little, probably because of the excitement of not running alone, then I watched Ty run the coaches mile the next day and run a 4:43. It made me wonder if I could get that fast. On the end of a 7 mile run today I happened to know right where the last mile started so I pushed to see what I could really do... I ran a 5:12. Huh I might not be that slow after all. At least it was a boost to my ego if nothing else, which I desperately needed after the brow beating I received at school this week studying the ins and outs of cardiology. Look for another post soon. Happy training!
