My “Rocky” Moment

Cue the Rocky soundtrack (original, not “Eye of the Tiger”) because that’s how I felt at the top of Wilke today on my final repeat.

I think Ironman training is teaching me a pretty basic lesson that, somehow, I hadn’t yet learned in these 10+ years of running. It’s teaching me to be in the moment in my workout.

I started out this morning thinking about the humidity (85 percent) combined with the temperature (somewhere in the upper 70s), which for me typically spells trouble. And then there were the hill repeats…I tend to think of myself as a crappy uphill runner. So as we were doing the warm-up run over to the hill, it was almost like I was pre-making excuses for a bad workout. I actually realized this as I was doing it. Instead, I chose to focus on making my splits descending. And I knew the key was I had to be sure to be slow enough on the first one. That was all I had to worry about when we started.

It’s been a long time since I did repeats on Wilke; the last time would’ve been back prior to ’04, when I was running with Coach Mixon Henry. Later, I hit Wilke a couple of times with various Rogue groups as part of Coach Steve Sisson’s 4-mile hilly loop, but that’s not the same — that loop has some seriously sweet downhills that seem to even things all out. A hilly loop is nothing like hill repeats.

Thank goodness I had Cathy to head up first. I let her climb away from me and concentrated on that first one truly being a warm-up. Time=2:39 You know what my last one was? 2:12

The four laps in the middle were truly in the middle and descending.

The glow from that success has lasted all day. And I know the workout was a success because I lived in the moment instead of thinking ahead to what might be or comparing to what I used to do.

I just took it one piece at a time and did my best at that particular point.