Sunday, August 20, 2006
Bio-Feedback: Listening to Your Body
At the start of this morning's EnduRace 8 K Run in Waterloo, I stood poised with my wrist watch timer ready to time each kilometre toward a personal best race! The formula was simple: if I run each kilometre in 6 minutes, I'll finish with a time of 48:00 (which would better last year's result of 49:46)! But things went wrong as soon as the gun sounded. As I pushed what I thought was the start button on my chronometer, the time of 9:00 AM popped up rather than the flashing number of the stop watch. In the midst of the stampede of 120 other racers, I tried unsuccessfully to reset it. "Oh, well," I said to myself. "I'll just have to listen to my body rather than letting the clock set my pace today."
Paying attention to body signals has often been a problem for me (and a lot of other men, I suspect). Ignoring pain and fatigue, being inattentive to stress, and being unconscious of warning signs has been a tendency most of my life. I wasn't sure that I could trust myself to run as fast as my body said I could, but hear when it was telling me where the "red line" was.
It turned out surprisingly well! I pushed, but listened to the bio-feedback. As the finish line and the big digital time clock came into view, it had just passed 46:40 and I was ahead of where I would have been had I allowed my wrist clock to dictate! My official finishing time was 47:10, almost two and a half minutes faster than last year! And I wasn't last in my age category either. To check the race results visit http://www.roadraceresults.com/display-race-results.php?racename=2006-endurrace-8k.
Doing better by listening to my body rather than ignoring it? A novel thought to go with a personal best! GG
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Great time... even greater lesson learned. Keep learning, and sharing your discoveries. You INSPIRE me.
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