Elite-level motivation: It's not (quite) what you think

Last week, I did a very hard but rewarding 45-minute structured fartlek workout here in Boulder, elevation 5,300’ (give or take). My coach, a two-time Olympian and extraordinarily warm and generous human being named Kathy Butler, has a way of setting up workouts that look fairly modest on paper but turn out to be gut-busters in the execution. This one, however, looked brutal even on paper.

When we were warming up, one or two of my mates were assessing the paved loop we’d be doing the workout on, a circuit of roughly 6K on the east side of town. This loop is about as flat as it gets, but you wouldn’t have known it from some of the clucking and banter. Probably the strongest athlete in the bunch was lamenting turning into a 200-meter-long “hill” halfway through the loop that would barely have been detectable using surveyor’s tools. Another was concerned about the wind being in our faces in the second half of the circuit; this wind didn’t even qualify as a zephyr, and if anything was welcome because of the warm-ish morning. Someone else grumbled, “I don’t even know if I can #*()& do this,” although no reason was given.

Although I have been a serious runner for over 30 years, this habit is not what landed me in Boulder, at least not directly. A lot of people do, however, specifically move here for the running – the “vibe” as much as the physical environment. I routinely see Olympians and national record-holders on the local roads and trails as well as in the coffee shops. There are, in other words, a lot of extremely dedicated distance runners within immediate reach.

Read the rest at Lowell Running.