Working hard

This morning I started off my day in the weight room for an hour and a half. This afternoon I went to the track at 1:30 and I left at 5:30. I’ve been sitting on my couch for most of the evening without any real motivation to move because my body is exhausted. As it should be. At this part of the season it’s time to go back to the base stuff a bit and wear your body down. Today consisted of long jump drills…approaches…jumps off a box…sled pulls…stair hops …more plyos…even more plyos!...and core work. Then I did my cool down. A mile run that probably took me a good 15 minutes to complete. It was one of those days that makes your legs shake long after you’ve stopped working out.

As I was sitting here completely fatigued I remembered a comment I overheard at the track a few weeks back. It was a Saturday and the track was particularly busy. All the sprinters were doing their respective workouts and the distance group was also out there doing a track workout. Saturdays are usually are longer sprint days and on this day the long sprinters were running 450’s and the short sprinters were doing 250’s. I had 300’s. Really fast. Full recovery. As the college sprinters were starting their runs I overheard one of the distance runners say…

Wow, the sprinters are actually working hard today.

Excuse me? I looked at him and hoped like mad that he would see me staring and realize that I had heard him just so I could hear how he’d try to explain that one…to my face. I think it’s pretty common knowledge that distance runners secretly think that they train harder than sprinters. Perhaps they won’t say it to our face but when they go on their little 45 min warm-up runs, they gossip about it like no other. Obviously if you run MORE that equates to HARDER. Well, I don’t necessarily agree.

Here’s the thing. I will never be a distance runner. No thank you. Even if I were gifted at it I’d still decline. I respect what they do and I will be the first to admit that it is challenging and extremely difficult when you are training to be really good at it. But I believe that they train hard differently, not exclusively. If their speed day calls for 300’s and they run 16 of them and jog for 100 meters as their rest period (which, by the way, I simply will never be able to wrap my head around jogging as a form of rest), while my workout is 4 of them with 10 minutes rest at which point I sit on the ground and rest, that does not mean you’ve worked out 4 times as hard as me. The math is not that simple.

I think booty lock is exclusive to sprinters and it doesn’t occur simply because we are not in as good of shape as those who run for longer distances, but because we are pushing our bodies to a certain intensity that isn’t called for when your event calls for you to go more than one time around the track. Almost anybody can run for 100 meters but very few can compete at that distance. Just like the tons of people who run marathons. You can’t compare that to actual marathoners.

So, if you’re a distance runner and you think that you are in a position to claim superiority when it comes to hard workouts, think again. I wouldn’t want to hang with you as you go round and round and you probably wouldn’t want to be out at the track with me today for 4 hours. Your skinny little legs would turn to jello. :) And let’s not even talk about the weight room.