Over ten years ago I wrote a post, "Confidence in Workouts," where I opined on my guarded realism in my workouts' predictive values for races. In it, I wrote that poor workouts sapped my confidence more than good workouts improved my confidence.
A poor workout would make me question my goal time of a race while a solid workout would make me feel only somewhat more confident about an upcoming race. Since then, however, I've read, "If One Bad Workout Lowers Your Confidence Level, You Weren't Confident in the First Place," an article from Matt Fitzgerald on the 80/20 Endurance Blog.
In the article, Fitzgerald writes, "an athlete’s best workouts are actually the most accurate indicators of their current fitness level and performance capacity." He goes on to explain that it is impossible to perform above one's current level of fitness, and relative easy to have a bad workout due to a variety of factors.
I had an amazing workout this past Saturday — eighteen miles with nine miles easy pace, six miles goal marathon pace, and three miles tempo pace. I nailed all my paces and didn't feel crummy afterwards.
Fitzgerald also writes that one should keep a level head and avoid extreme ends of confidence and insecurity (I really recommend the article as it applies to all areas of life), so I'm not going to get overly confident about my upcoming marathon based on this workout, but it does have me feeling more confident than it would have in the past.
Run well.
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