Tension vs. Force

Here's a great quote that I retweeted today from 2:04:58 marathoner (PR from Boston 2011, btw) Ryan Hall: "The art of running is finding the tension between working hard and forcing workouts. Breakthrough comes in tension. "

I think that this is true of ANY workout across sports, but I know that it is something that we confront specifically in running and triathlon every day, and perhaps even moreso, at this time of year as we step up the load and the pace to prepare to race (gee, that rhyme just developed itself).

For me, my workout yesterday was a great example of this quote at work.  I'd been feeling a bit tired during the week as a result of the intensity I had been putting into training.  Tuesday was a fairly hard bike ride followed later in the evening by a hard run, which actually went pretty well considering how I felt.  However, when I arrived at the track yesterday evening for my speed workout, I could feel in my legs that "speed workout" could be an oxymoron.  Nevertheless, I intended to put forth a good effort and get the workout into the books and into my legs.

Halfway through, after I'd run actually a bit faster than I'd intended -- a good example of the tension mentioned above since it wasn't easy but also was not a struggle to complete -- when I went to start another pickup, I felt that my legs had nothing, and I'd begun to feel some soreness creep in.  At that point, I knew that I'd be forcing the rest of the workout if I went forward, and what I did next was somewhat of a surprise to me: I did not do the next 400M repeat; instead, I just did my easy warm down, feeling that discretion was the better part of valor at that point.

We all are confronted by times at which we need to choose to welcome the tension and go a bit harder, and we are often in situations where forcing it might be the only way to complete a workout.  I'd argue that forcing it is never good as it delivers diminishing returns, either by making us more fatigued longer than we need to be or potentially opening us up to injury.  Instead, embrace those moments of tension and use them to build upon, but be wise enough not to force the issue if your body is telling you it's had enough.

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