My weekly chat through with coach Will is always cool. This week was ultra cool….we talked about how to distance yourself from the physical when training whilst remaining mentally in the process and how to harness excellance by watching the best at what they do.As I have mentioned, I have been reading Michael Phelps’ autobiography which has proved fascinating. He shares how he watched video after video of Thorpe swimming when he needed to up his game in the 200 freestyle. This week coach Will told me to watch Bekele run in the 10,000m at the worlds in Berlin. My aim in doing this was to watch the fantastic running form and then imagine that as I was running(asking myself “how would it feel to run like Bekele?” ). It is a very powerful exercise and one I use in my work as a Neuro Linguistic Programming practitioner. I have sent clients to you tube etc to watch an excellant sport performance, then to hold an image of how that would feel in themselves.This weekend brings a big weekend of training for me - following a great week of sessions. Today I will do the long run(delayed from Thursday) and tomorrow is the first race simulation; it will be a long day but nothing I have not done before. The weather forecast is hot and sunny which is perfect, I will map out and practice race nutrition and try to make everything as close to how I want it to be on October 10th. I will be visualising how I want to be feeling as I race on that day and I can feel that I am starting that slightly inward journey that happens before a big race…..so forgive me if I see anyone and seem a little more off with the fairies than normal!

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 22nd, 2009 at 8:58 am and is filed under Paula's journey to Kona. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.