I’ve been accused of having tunnel vision at various points in my life. It’s not necessarily a compliment, but it seems to work for me. What is tunnel vision? Locking into something and excluding (often at your peril) everything and everyone else. Exams, opinions, career choices, etc. However, I realized last night that there may be no better application for tunnel vision that marathon training.
Seemingly everywhere I look I see countdowns to the big day. Folks ask me, “Are you excited about the marathon? Are you getting nervous?” Frankly, I rarely think about the actual race. It’s beyond me right now. As a rookie, I have no point of reference. No memories. No life changing moments. Other than spectating last year, it is completely foreign to me. Now the irony is not lost on me that I have basically dedicated the last 13 months of my life to getting ready for something that I don’t even think about when its 60 days away.
The only countdown in my world is … the next workout. I’m living day-to-day … literally one step in front of the other. I frankly don’t know any other way to approach it. If I accumulate quality workouts I will be physically prepared and mentally I will have string of positive experiences from which to draw on the Day of Reckoning. 
Seriously, in my mind, my next workout is the most important run of my life. To that end, Tuesday’s workout marked my long-awaited (at least to me) return to the track. It’s been 2 weeks since I actually banged out some intervals with the team. On the agenda was a personal favorite – 12x400s @ 5k pace w/ 200 recovery. I kept my expectations in check specifically because it’s been 2 weeks and many long miles since the last time I stretched it out.
The splits:
Despite the longish warm up, it still took nearly half of the workout to shake the legs loose. Cool. I was happy to trail the pack in the beginning. I didn’t know what I had in the tank, so it was certainly wise to ease into the session. Once we hit #6, I started to settle in and ran tired comfortably. I started inching up to the lead pack and found a rhythm. It was a good group that ran just hard enough to progress properly on the back half. Knocking off 1 second an interval is the way to go. As usual, I emptied the tank on the finale. After logging slow miles for a solid month, it was nice to open it up a bit.
I had a nice convo with our coach afterwards. He liked my tunnel vision approach to marathon training. Honestly, he was surprised when I told him about it. Apparently, most first timers get overwhelmed/obsessive with the distance and their training suffers a bit because of the mental struggle. That very well could still happen to me, but I have to hope the horse blinders I’m wearing remain secure for a few more weeks.