I’ve always been a slave to the technology when it comes to running. As soon as I could afford it, I went out and bought myself a shiny, beautiful Garmin Forerunner 305. It was love. There was something about being able to track my distance, my pace, everything. I loved that at any given moment, all I had to do was look at the watch and I would know exactly how I was doing on my run. Plus, having the big red watch on my wrist made me look like a runner. I felt…official!
Isn’t it pretty?!
Then something happened.
I got obsessed.
I couldn’t go more than a minute or two without checking my “stats”. It started to get me down. Why was my pace this? Why was it not faster? Why hadn’t I run farther?
It made my running suffer.
It made running a chore.
It increased my negative self-talk.
I kept a steady pace but I never improved no mater how consistent I was in my running. There could be many, many factors at play but one of the big ones was my using technology to dictate performance instead of running and training based on how I felt.
After my pregnancy/birth running hiatus, the time came to strap on the running shoes yet again. I was more than ready and incredibly eager to get going but hesitant to strap on the Garmin. Problem was, I needed it in order to track my run/walk intervals.
I made a decision that changed my running.
I set the Garmin to my intervals and hide my pace and distance stats. The watch would now tell me when to run and when to walk but my body would dictate my pace.
I ran based on feeling not expectation.
I’ve never run faster (PR’d my 5K earlier this month), better (so far, no injuries) or more happily (always looking forward to the next run).
And I’ve never felt better!
One Happy Mother Runner!
VERY INTERESTING.
Im an intuitive eater AND exerciser—just not really a runner so Id not yet thought of it that way.
I was exactly like that, except with the treadmill. I had to put book or paper over the time and distance clocks otherwise I would keep looking down at them and get upset. Now I run outside with my nike+ app and I love that. I can’t check it obsessively since it’s on my arm!
GREAT POST! I have to run with tech, because my little defective ticker requires monitoring. Intuitively I have gotten to a point where I can assess if my heart is happy or struggling, but I need the reassurance I get from my polar heart rate monitor. I don’t think I could go bare, but I can definitely see the benefits for you. Way to go!
I agree – running without knowing your pace is a great way to learn how to pace yourself, and to learn how it feels when you’re running with proper form etc. I follow a training plan that tells me how fast/slow I should run, and I use very little external feedback on my runs to accomplish that. When I first began running (12 yrs ago) tech devices were not popular yet, so we all ran intuitively, and I continue to do so. (Though I admit that after a run it’s really nice to look at my average pace to see if I was running as hard/slow as I was supposed to). Greta job Steph!
[...] I ran 13k on Saturday and was amazed when I recorded my run on dailymile to see that I ran at a pace that used to be my race pace on a training run day. Not only did I finish strong but I felt great [...]
[...] for thing to be different. I’m not as focused on my pace as I usually am (see my post on running intuitively for my reasons why), and I’m pretty sure that I will not finish last but rather somewhere in [...]