Alright everyone, Happy Friday! I know its been quite a while since we’ve had a chance to chat. Well That’s because a few reasons. 1) I’ve really been pretty focused on taking care of myself both on and off the track and haven’t made the time to drop off some info for yall.
Anyways, since I’ve been focusing more on what I want and am working towards, I’ve seen a good amount of improvement and have been progressing quickly. Last week I ended up running a great race and just about ran my fastest time ever. Things are looking up for me, and I’m starting to see some payouts from the work that I put in several months prior.
One reason I think I may be having such a late spark for decent times, as compared to collegiately, is because of the volume of running we did then. Not just running, but competing, is a key to a lot of success for collegiate athletes. The many weekends of competition from indoor seasons straight through to outdoor profit the athletes to “run themselves into shape”. As a professional our season doesn’t really “start” until about May and then runs all the way through August, September, and for some as late as October. So that is a much different schedule than the college Dec-June schedule.
The problem lies that when a collegiate athlete starts competing in December say, it will take them until about April or early May to start to run extremely fast (i.e. competitive with the professional athletes). That means for the average person they don’t run comfortably fast for about 4 - 4.5 months. Theoretically, that means as a rookie or new professional track athlete your peaking period won’t take place until about July and August. The unfortunate truth about this is that in mid-June the availability of races in the states is slim to none. The majority of races are run in Europe and abroad, but in order to get to those meets you have to run quick times or qualifying times early in the season to set you up for the whole professional season.
The challenge for the new professionals is to fine tune your training and race readiness so much so that it only takes a few races to run fast and lock in some of those later meets overseas. That’s one of the main reasons I can say I have been faltering to run fast earlier in the season…I just need more competitions. I used to run 3 events in college, now I run 1 and don’t even get a chance to run a relay at the end of the day. It definitely has an effect, but I’m going to find ways to move myself into the right mindset in order to run fast now. After all its my time now! I’ll let you all in on some of the things that have helped me succeed thus far in my next post (tomorrow after race). This is the life…of DK the Great. PEACE!
