Big lesson: I don't have to feel good in order to run fast

I was feeling sick, tired and weak when I got to Potts Field for a key final track workout before heading to England for the British Championship 5k for Old Gits who Really Should Know Better.

My usual easy 3-mile warm up? Well, I walked 800m, grumbling to myself, and then eased into a reluctant jog-shamble for another 800m. Not good. The night before, Abby and I had one of those all-encompassing domestic discussions about life, work, money, relationships, gardening and why the gutters leak all over the place. It finished on a positive note, but we were both drained by the end of it. Add in a supra-normal dose of work stress as I try to finish the magazine early so I can travel...

The work-out was advertised as a fairly brutal series: 1600m, 1200m, 800m, 400m, all to be at goal race pace or faster: ie 5:40 per mile or better. We would then finish off with a series of 200s and 100s for leg speed. It called for the first lap of the first mile to be 85 seconds-ish. "How are you feeling?" asked Ric, as I lined up. "Not too good", I replied. "I thought I'd start feeling better after the warm-up drills, but it hasn't really made a difference. I'll do the workout, but I don't know what I can hit". Ric told me not to worry. If the first 400 was 90 seconds, that was OK. Just put the effort in -- it would still pay off at sea level.

I ended up having one of the best workouts of my life. I did the mile in 5:45, the 1200 and 800 in equally ridiculous times, but Ric had saved his masterstroke for the 400. He stuck me in with tracklete Dave Albo, sprint coach Heather Biglow, a nationally ranked heptathlete, and a posse of our super-fast teens. They were running 500s; I had permission to stop at 400. "What are you shooting for? Give me a time", says Ric. "Well, I've been feeling comfortable around 82-85, so let's go for a 78". I missed Ric's sly grin, but I know he had one as he led me into position round the first 150...where I started feeling good and caught Dave and Heather on the final curve to finish in 69 seconds! What a trip!

"I can't get my head round the fact that I feel so bad, but my body still seems able to do the times", I said to another of our sprinters, Steven Sashen, who among other things is a meditation teacher and all-round deep-ish thinker. He told me he'd had the same experience. In fact he's written a nice blog article about it here (scroll down to "Semper Ube, Sub Ube") . He'd kept a record of his feelings before one-rep max deadlifts and noticed that he often set PRs on days he wasn't feeling on song. "10 times out of 10, a new personal best was on a day that I felt weak, tired, injured, distracted or otherwise “negative", he writes.

Steven also told me that he'd noticed that elite athletes often report the same phenomenon.

He says in his blog:

"Twice today someone asked me, 'But if you feel confident and visualize getting what you want, don’t you believe that you will, at least, increase the probability that you’ll get it?'

"The shortest answer I came up with was: No."

This is not so much counter-intuitive, as counter everything we're told by our culture about the value of positive thinking -- or "positive self-talk" as sports psychologists and coaches put it.

The lesson was rammed home for me by a tv documentary that same night on Sir Elton John. Elton, a fiend of Princess Diana, was given the high-pressure honour of performing live in Westminster Abbey at Diana's funeral. He sang "Goodbye England's Rose", accompanying himself on the piano, in front of a unique audience of the great and the good -- and a worldwide tv audience of billions. Watching a recording of the performance, Elton said that all he was thinking at the time was "Don't screw up, don't hit a wrong note, don't forget the words, don't show any emotion. Be stoic." Not a direct quote, but that was the gist of it. In other words, his self-talk was all "wrong", and he didn't go in there feeling on top of the world -- far from it, he was an emotional wreck, as many of us in Britain were at the time, at the funeral of a friend.

But as Abby put it, he'd been performing for 30 years -- his body knew what to do. It's the same for us; if we train and race regularly, there does come a point where the body knows what to do -- the mind and emotions do not have to be in perfect shape. Yes, I did my "tapping" as I warmed up, and yes, I did get the self-talk going along the lines of, "Even feeling sick, tired and weak, I can still do the workout", but the fact remains that when I started my repeats, I still felt bad.

My last workout was a real confidence boost on a physical level. But as far as preparing for the British Masters championship 5k goes, it was much more important to finally "get" that I don't have to be feeling great, mentallly or emotionally, to be able to run my best. What a relief!