Some of the best advice I have received in my career was to be patient and calm and weather the storm. It can be applied to your week, day and even an hour.

I went out for an hour+ run in the heat. It was 90 F and pretty humid here in NYC on Saturday. I like to feel like I am making progress and often run hard in shorter runs of 30-40 min and sometimes up to an hour.

I’m just starting to get my mileage back up. As I was getting ready for my run, I started thinking about the goal for it. Sometimes I don’t!

What would success look like today?

My goal was to be consistent. No need to push hard. I was building volume. It was hot. When hot, it’s easy to get anxious. Just like a race. I visualized myself in the hot Atacama desert in Chile. Practicing deep breaths and keeping calm.

In past races I have gone out hard to early from excitement and burned out the rest of the race. I have also been consistent 80% of a race day, then pushed hard and still affected me later in the race in a big way.

Sometimes its mentally harder to just slow down, to be consistent, to keep your emotions in check.

To be calm and thoughtful under pressure allows you to save your energy for times in the future when it really benefits you to step on the gas pedal.

I ran a very consistent and solid 80 min to the tee! It also allowed me to break that time into chunks and work on form as relates to my spine, core and head positioning. Areas that if I improve over time, when running 1 million steps in the actual race I can leverage to big pay off!

How do you put yourself in the position to run an even 5 days this week?

Colin