Sprints are the worst. You know who likes sprints? – People who run track or who people who compete in the 5k or, like I mentioned before, people in Pamplona who have bulls chasing them down a city street.

one acceptable reason to sprint

I HATE sprints! Sprints just remind me how slow I am. That’s it. There is no good portion of doing sprints for me. I’m a cup-half-empty sprinter. It doesn’t matter how “fast” I start off sprinting. I end up focusing on how much slower I get at the end of the sprints. And I get scared that, because I’m not good at this, I have surely pulled something on these sprints and I’ll wake up tomorrow and realize I’m out of marathon training. Yeah, I go to a dark mental place sprinting. I guess the only good thing is that it’s generally over before you know it. At least there’s that.

We didn’t end up doing hill sprints today. There was a last minute change and we did road sprints, with hill sprints pushed off to next week. I was pretty annoyed at first because I like a firm schedule for things. Also, with hill sprints we warmup for a mile first but with road sprints we just end up walking a little bit and then end up in a full on sprint session! I won’t be doing that again. I’ll have to show up earlier and warmup. We ended up doing a bunch of 200s and then finished with 400s. I don’t feel like I did a lot of running but I was at least on target for my mileage for the day.

But, anyway, after a couple road sprints, I was grateful we weren’t on an incline too! I was glad I’d have another week to DETOX from M&Ms and full on breakfasts with our out-of-town visitors (read: bacon, eggs, biscuits, butter…) and get back into my marathon training lifestyle. I thought I was going to puke today during sprints and it’s completely to do with this recent lifestyle (“lifestyle” is my fancy word for bacon and/or chocolate).

you’d think these people would be sprinting faster here

Honestly I can’t wait for tomorrow’s easy 5 miles, plugged into Netflix on my treadmill. I know that makes me seem like a loser but oh well! I’ve had a bunch of really good, brisk, successful runs on the treadmill lately and I’m happy with those. But, ok, I’m not quitting the sprints. Deep down I know they are making me stronger and helping me to PR in the marathon this year – *fingers crossed*!! And my new mini goal is to not curse sprints every single week I do them. They are a necessary evil. I’m not going to dwell on them and I’m going to block them out of my mind as soon as I finish them each week.

Anyone else have some interesting run-coping mechanisms to share? What are some of the maybe crazy things you tell yourself to get through a training session?