David Taylor Gonzales

7/2

Last night I finished a 55 minute tempo workout. 10 min warm up, 2 x 15:00 @ 10k pace (7:35ish pace), 5 min recovery between, 10 min cool down. It felt great. I usually dread these speed workouts but I really enjoyed this one. Garmin wanted me to do a threshold workout (same structure but 6:50 pace) but I wanted to throttle back a bit and I think that’s why I actually enjoyed the workout. Total stats: 6.82 miles, 8:18 average pace, 147 average HR.

I was drinking water in the kitchen after the workout when a thought crossed my mind: when you start something new, your mind has had days, weeks or months even to prepare for it. Your body, however, is still at the starting line. It’s important that you treat yourself with grace when taking on that new challenge. There’s almost always a gap between mental preparedness and physical ability. If there is no gap, it might be a sign that the goal isn’t high enough. Even if you think you’re ready, you may be shocked at your body’s inability to execute. That’s totally normal, it’s part of the process. But if you start with the expectation that you’ll be able to execute your plan perfectly the first time, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

I remember installing my squat rack a few weeks back and staring at the pull-up bar. I decided that I was going to start doing pull-ups twice a week to strengthen my back. I began building out my workouts, assuming that I’d be able to do three sets of five pull-ups to start. And do you know what happened? I could barely squeak out three pull-ups on my first set before switching to jumping negatives. My mind was ready to do fifteen pull-ups. My body was not. I was really disappointed leaving the garage that night. But it’s a good reminder that if discipline is required to show up and train consistently, grace is required to keep us from burning out and giving up.

7/3

It’s a difficult thing to have grace for myself during the summer months. My pace slows, my VO2 max stagnates, all the metrics I use to measure whether I’m performing well or not seem to decrease this time of year. Obviously it’s heat related but still, it’s a mental hurdle for me. I ran a base run at 9:00 pace for 6 miles. That felt like a failure because I didn’t hit 8:40 like I wanted to. Was it a failure? No. I did what I needed to do for the workout. I was within the range I wanted to be in. But I find that when I put my faith and trust in the metrics instead of Jesus, it ends up being a losing battle. No matter how high I climb, there will always be someone above me. There will always be an athlete or a time goal or a distance PR to chase. I have two choices. Either I believe that God is sufficient to cover my weaknesses and I can choose to lean into His strength, or I can dwell on all my shortcomings and beat myself over the head with them until eventually, I decide it’s all futile and decide to retire the running shoes permanently.

“A run doesn’t end when you stop, it ends when you don’t start again.” -Coach Bennett, Nike Run Club

“Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight, and sin which clings so closely, and let us run with endurance the race that is set before us.” Hebrews 12:1

The sin I’m choosing to lay down this week is the sin of pride, the sin of believing that my best is sufficient, the sin of believing that I ought to have no weaknesses for God to cover for me., the sin of believing I have no sin.

The more I write in this blog the more I think back to Coach Bennett’s words in the early days of my running journey, back when I would run in the same old pair of sneakers I mowed my lawn in, those days before I ever spent a dollar on running equipment or knew what cadence was or cared about my vertical ratio.

“This is about running, this is not about running.”

Keep Going!