Beautiful evening run along the Nashville river trail after work. One week of this "fun running" until it's time to do a little real training again. I read a good article today in a Triathlon magazine flying in this afternoon. Been thinking a bit about it today. The basic idea was that each athlete's potential is like a ladder, with rungs all the way up. The top rung represents your top potential and the rungs down are levels you can perform at. Athletes perform at different rungs of their individual ladder, most far down from the top. Some reach a new rung on the ladder and feel it's the top rung and spend years training to that rung, back up and down. Some good athletes train rung to rung, reaching plateaus each time and having to find some new technique or level of training each time to have a "breakthrough" to the next rung. The author was focusing on masters and the question of how much performance is lost as a result of age. His idea was that you began to lose a few rungs off the ladder as you get older, but that your current level probably isn't affected since most of us perform so far down our ladder anyways due to family priorities, bad training or plain laziness. I think it helps explain why we are seeing more focused older athletes doing some crazy times. It's why you feel, what the #$%&, I can run so much faster than this!, sometimes. Maybe that's why I love marathoning. There's something about the sport that makes you want to discipline yourself, to strive for consistency in something that is so easy to do great or to fail miserably in. It's like your heart seems to know that the top rung is so way above what you are doing, that the process of figuring out how to get to it or what's worth sacrifing to get there, is more fun than the race. Every now and then just getting a glimpse of that top rung is a bigger rush than winning. | 