The beauty of the breakthrough

The breakthrough, the moment your training starts to pay off, when you go from feeling totally inadequate, to fly-mode. If you’ve been following my blog, you’ll know I’m about a month and a half into building my base back up after spending the winter way, way north with work, but that’s all changed now.

This week I got my first taste of workouts to come. We’re turning up training intensity and I’m feeling that breakthrough looming.

On Tuesday, my coach Jason Warick and I spent a session working on agility drills, getting different muscles going and strengthening. It felt great, but still very much in the low intensity range. We talked a bit about what’s to come for racing as well. We’re aiming to have me peak in the fall. We’ll decide the distance in the next month before training really revs up.

In the meantime, I got a tiny taste of what’s to come last week, a pleasant reminder that the breakthrough will come. Wednesday evening Jason let me go a bit at our group training session. Nothing earth shattering, just some good solid moderate miles at a pace a bit quicker than he’s let me go so far.

There’s something about a quicker pace that gets the blood going. A hint of what’s to come is very valuable. Trevor Hofbauer and I were chatting about this last week. As one of the country’s top young distance runners, he’s been there and he knows the feeling of the breakthrough. I asked him to jot down some of his thoughts so I could share them this week.

“The breakthrough gives a runner the best feeling in the world! There’s no way to describe it, but all you know is that your body has changed/adapted and you’re on the verge of smashing a PB. Sometimes the breakthrough happens a few weeks, or a month before your big race, but the best thing to do is harness it and let it out on race day.”

Trevor doesn’t race within the month of his goal race. He holds it all in for the big one.

“To hold back and store the energy is incredibly tough, but trust me, in the end, it will make your new PB that much better.”

Solid advice from a guy who just last month was the third Canadian to cross the finish line at the Vancouver Sun Run.