Exercise for the mind, not just the body

All that talk a few posts back (here and here) about how our brain can work against our best efforts to achieve our goal got me thinking: maybe we can teach our brains to work for us instead of against us. Surfing through running books on Amazon, I stumbled across the title on the left by Matt Fitzgerald, running coach and author. Brain Training for Runners is based on the premise that distance runners can improve performance if they provide the brain with the right feedback. Fitzgerald's work brings recent research findings to bear on a number of areas critical to distance running; among them fatigue, pacing, and dealing with injuries. Clearly, these areas, and the others covered in this book, offer great potential for exercising mind over matter. Weighing in at nearly six hundred pages, digesting all that Matt Fitzgerald has to say might take some time, however.

Another extremely important topic to distance runners - and therefore to the timelapserunner - is hydration. Marathon race routes are invariably littered with paper cups every mile or two as runners grab water (or sports drink) from aid station workers or off the tables there. Drink too little during a race and you risk dehydration or worse (e.g., heat stroke); drink too much and you risk hyponatremia, which can even lead to death. Common wisdom has cautioned runners to "drink even when you are not thirsty," fearing the devil on the left side of the road. But too much water - even if you don't approach illness - makes runner performance suffer. This brand new title, Waterlogged, from Dr. Tim Noakes purportedly brings together the best research and personal experience - Noakes is a veteran of more than 70 marathons and ultramarathons - to dispel myths and provide state-of-the-science hydration guidelines for endurance athletes. And, yes, that would include the timelapserunner.

In a fit of hunger for knowledge - or perhaps fear of failure - we've order both titles from Amazon and hope to come up to speed on these important topics during training this fall.

TODAY'S WORKOUT: A good Tuesday workout, with planned pace of 11:47 minutes per mile - actual: 11:47, using intervals of 2:04 / 1:00, and nominal running pace of 10:27. Faithful to our 21-day commitment to the Wharton's active-isolated stretching, we did our Fab-14 prior to heading out. Injury report: nothing consequential; mild tweaking here and there on the left side.