Chasing PBs

Expecting to always run a PB in a race, to always perform better in training today than you did yesterday, is setting yourself up for disappointment. After all, the body isn’t a precisely-callibrated machine and how it performs is influenced by all kinds of things: the weather, hydration, fatigue, stress, nutrition, motivation….even the time of the month or time of day. So I got a bit annoyed with myself last night. I did a 5km race in Epping Forest - and ran 18 seconds slower than over the same course last year. There were reasons - it was a humid evening, I’d done a 14-miler two days before, I’m a year older(!)… but I still felt disappointed about those 18 seconds. ‘You should know better,’ I scolded myself. Knowing the science of training, the ‘why and how’ of getting fitter, it’s perfectly logical that performance should fluctuate rather than improve continually. And yet… it’s still disheartening to clock a slower time. I suppose that’s why PBs are so special, and why we keep chasing them…