First, let me say that I didn’t do anything yesterday. Bad Richard. I was slated to do a 3 mile run and a 90 minute elliptical workout, but other things - including the desire to spend some evening time at home - kept me away from the gym. At least we got a good long dog-walk in.

Anyway, Martin just posted an off the cuff comment that I personally happen to find immensely true, and I figured I’d steal it and share it with y’all:

[When] you want to become good at something, you must surround yourself with people who are far better than you, and train your bollocks off to get to their level

Yup. Too true. I know many people who ran with an AustinFit pace group in last year’s marathon training, and are doing the same thing again this year - maybe moving up 15 seconds or so. If you stay with the same groups, with the same ideas of what “success” is - especially if its something that the group knows is attainable - you’re not going to move terribly quickly. Some of my best gains happened when I joined the Gazelles, a notoriously fast training group here in town, and adjusted my ideas to the point where a 20:00 5K has become a reasonable goal for next season - easy to do when there are quite a few folk turning in times well below that on a regular basis.

I was injured last year and this year, and while I’m not where I would have hoped to be, I’m still aiming to move by target marathon pace up by two minutes. I know that’s not something that you can do year after year, but for me at least I feel that its the least I can shoot for at this point. One of the people I met in that group, Alex, started out doing 10:30 miles with the rest of us and is now doing 150 miles per month while running at a very fast pace - he just did hilly mile+ repeats at something like a 6:15 pace yesterday. Our bodies can do so much more than we might think it capable of, and I think that we owe it to ourselves to prove - at least to ourselves - just what we can do if we get out there and try.

I’ve got some more thoughts about this that I’ll be sharing this weekend on my blog’s one year anniversary - but that quote from Martin was too good to pass up without sharing it out. You may not always hit the goals that you set for yourself, may not always live up to your expectations, but you will almost always live down to them. Belive in yourself, surround yourself with people better than you, get out there, and live.

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