Thursday, June 2, 2011

Why do we hold ourselves back?

When it comes to running, I fall into one of two extremes. Either I don't turn on the stopwatch at all, or I obsessively run with the clock. "Tune into your effort level", a much wiser runner keeps telling me, but that's something I've never been able to do.
Yesterday, the display counter on the treadmill was off, so I had to run by effort. And I was shocked by what I could do. Today, I chose a much higher speed, and comfortably broke a barrier I never thought I would reach.

Why do we choose to hold ourselves back?
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drabble is a story told in exactly 100 words.

7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Natasha - How sad it is that very often, we hold the key to the prisons in which we lock ourselves...

kjmckendry said...

I think it's fear of failure, yet when we fail to push ourselves is when we truly fail.

sarah said...

i think it can be very hard to tune into effort level, since so much of running is mental. try running with a heart rate monitor -- that can really take the guess work out.

Alex J. Cavanaugh said...

See? Leave the watch home next time.

Mary@GigglesandGuns said...

Fear. Fear that we will succeed. Fear that we won't succeed. So we chose a point of comfort and stay there.

Suzanne said...

What an interesting occurrence. We really do put limits and restrictions on everything we do. We need to somehow figure out a daily reminder to ourselves to not do that for the day.

ViolaNut said...

I'm still trying to find the temperature and pace where neither my horrible-side-cramp-from-hell or my totally-kacked-up-knee kicks in and makes me stop. :-P I should probably go try again now. ;-)

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