Information Overload

Not many people are prepared to sit in a boat in all weathers, being shouted at through a megaphone, in front of not only the rest of their crew, but also all the other crew on the river at the time. Consequently, although amazing in most ways, rowing is still quite a ‘niche’ sport.

However, in the last couple of decades, seemingly every Tom, Dick and Shelia has donned a pair of brightly coloured running shoes and gone out to pound the pavements in a wave of endorphins/smugness (delete as appropriate).  Whereas 20 years ago, someone finishing a marathon was looking on with a slight sense of awe – the mass-participation of our sports has made it almost ordinary, especially when faced with such feats as Ironman, MDS, UTMB etc.

Now I’m not here to rant about running playing second fiddle to Ironman (a post for another time), but the explosion in popularity of running means that for the avid (read slightly obsessive) enthusiast, there’s never been more information available to digest.

You can read countless websites about running, you can subscribe to magazines about running, listen to podcasts on running, read books on running, watch DVDs on running, tweet about running, talk about running (and most of us do... a lot). Quite frankly it’s exhausting. 

Which each new information source comes that hope that this one tit-bit of information will be the key to unlocking previously unknown speed and potential in our running. Suddenly PBs will fall, Miles will fly by and hills suddenly flatten themselves. Of course, this doesn’t generally happen.

One of the reasons I got a coach was that I wanted to make sure that my training was the best I could be possibly doing at that moment. I’ve reaped the rewards of consistent, focused training and now run times I only previously dreamed of. Of course, I’m still not satisfied but I know that I can improve further with a bit of grit and hard work in the future.

Problem is I still find myself spending hour after hour still reading all the gunk on the internet. Wondering if Pfitzinger & Douglas’s plan is relatively better than Hal Hidgon’s? Would Yasso 800s  better for me than a 45 mins progession run? What’s the damn value of hills anyway?...Arrggh.

These questions are impossible to answer straight away, if at all, and certainly won’t be answered sitting on the sofa on a Sunday evening tapping away on the internet.

Sometimes you just have to go with the flow. The challenge for me is that I find it difficult, if nigh on impossible to drown out all that ‘running chatter’ that goes on and stay focused on what I need to.

So how do you do it?