A little bit about me:
This will be my very first post on the blog. I have been wanting to be able to pass my experiences and knowledge onto as many other people as possible to try and encourage new people to the sport and to help anyone who is need a little hand in training, nutrition, racing, kit or shoes.
I have recently just finished my first year of university and absolutely loved every minute of it. This year has been full of new challenges and experiences and I have loved every minute of. I have found this year that being happier is a lot more healthy and allows your life to be positive. This is no different for running. You need to be happy and positive in order to perform well, its simple human physiology.
Positivity:
We all have good days and we all have bad days, thats just life. This will be the same for your running as it will be for your everyday life. However as a runner you need to be able to use your running to focus yourself, give yourself a direction or even as stress release. I personally look forward to my run and know that it is a time for me to switch off from the stress of life and just focus on pushing myself to find new limits. However, I know that if my mind isn't in the right place I won't achieve my top performance. In order to do this your life needs to be positive from the simple aspect of smiling to being polite to people. As the saying goes manners cost nothing. You will be surprised how much happier you will be if you smile, socialise and be yourself.
From my experience having a happier mind set and surrounding yourself with good friends and family makes me happy and allows me to run at my best. However that is me, you need to find what works best for you and what makes you happy.
Positivity is key!
Targets and Aims:
I started the year coming back into running from injuries and haven taken some time off to do other sports. In January I set myself 5 aims and 3 targets. These were very personal to me and what I wanted to achieve. I think this is the very first thing I would tell someone who was thinking of getting into running that they need to find their aims and targets.
These often confuse people as they are not the same thing. An aim is something very achievable and something you are highly likely to achieve as well as probably being short term. A target is a challenge. Its the thing to get you out of bed on a Monday morning at 6am to run in the rain while all your friends and family are asleep. The challenges you set yourself could be anything from completing your very first Park Run 5k to an Ultra Marathon. It all depends on you. Everyone is human but we are all different and grow and develop at different speeds. You need to make sure that your targets and aims are for you and not just what your friends or competition is aiming for. I can speak from my experiences and say that getting carried away and getting overly competitive can lead to bad results, injuries and poor running.
At the start of the year I took my challenges and aims and made myself a yearly plan to map out where I wanted to be at what stage in the year. For example by the start of May I wanted to be able to run a sub 17 minute 5km. However by the end of summer I wanted to run a sub 16:30, 5km.
I knew I had the time in summer while I was not at university to focus a lot more on my running so a lot of my challenges like running up Ben Nevis, completing a sub 3 hour marathon are all later in the year. However my aims are very short term in the form of weekly and monthly distances I want to be able to run and maybe short term races like focusing on my 5k and 10k times.
My best advice from my own experiences is to sit yourself down and make your targets and aims very clear. Make them something to aim for everyday. Most importantly have a positive mindset when you are working on them.
Happy Running, The Hairy Runner.
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