Coach Jeff: Love that story about Marathon Guo!
Stone Cutter: Thank you for sharing that story about your experience. A lot of what you said resonated with me, both in terms of your approach to training and in terms of the experience of being away from running and then coming back again.
HRE: As a semi-reformed pre-race basketcase, I can definitely identify with that part of your experience. Oddly enough, I think part of what "cured" me was being chronically DFL at the beginning of my college running career (such as it was). It kind of forced me to become more focused on my own performance and less focused on competing with others (because frankly, I was kind of alone out there a lot of the time).
Even after I did start to get a little faster, focusing on performance more than competition continued to be what worked the best for me. Part of this was standard "run your own race" stuff, but part of it involved consciously letting go of "competitive" thinking. Basically, I would try to run as if I were running alone, and to the degree that I engaged with other runners, I would try to think of them as comrades rather than competitors. And just to be clear, I did this not because I wasn't interested in racing, but because it was something that helped me to race better. That was the way I got myself into the "tunnel" that RRR was talking about.
Part of this certainly had to do with my own personality quirks, but during the time I spent coaching high school kids, I found that this general approach, counterintuitive as it might be, was something that could help other people race better, too. Not that I would suggest it for everybody, obviously, but for kids who were struggling to race up to their ability because of stress or nerves, it was something that seemed to help.
OR: Pappy is giving you very good advice about the warmup, I think. Don't worry about running out of steam, you need to do enough to get the flywheel going.