The Chattahoochee 10k
This was a breakthrough race for me in a sense. I'm definitely progressing really well in my running. Consistently improving in form, time, and feel. My next focus area needs to be mental toughness. I need to work a lot harder on living with the pain and not giving into it. (And by that, I don't mean pain as in injury - I mean the pain of stressing my body past the comfort zone.)
In this race, I did a pretty good job of that. I took off from the line pretty quickly - arguably a little too quickly based on the time I was shooting for. [Side note - I have yet to really pick a pace and stick with it from beginning to end of a race. I keep running by feel - which seems to work for me even though it doesn't exactly lend itself to good finish time predictions.] Anyway, I was hurting and hating and hadn't hit the two mile marker yet. Not good at all. So, since I have been thinking about this a lot lately, I really worked at mentally changing that. I focused on bottling up the pain, purging the bad thoughts and visualizing a strong, solid run, and keeping good form. Plus, I gave myself a mental reward/intermediate goal. I allowed myself a 3 second full stop at the mid-point to drink a glass of water. That very brief pause made a world of difference. Mentally it turned it into two 3.1 mile races instead of one 6.2 mile race - -and that's a big difference.
So ultimately, I mentally powered through in this one, set a PR, and qualified for Wave A for Peachtree. That's what I call a good Saturday morning!
