Haas Blog: 'I Need To Tone Down My Competitive Nature'

By Mark Haas

Completed my first week of speed work with the Runner's Edge of the Rockies training group.

Tuesday night we met at Cheeseman Park, and after a 45 minute rain/hail/lightning delay, we did "hill repeats" – a couple hundred yards up a slight incline, jog back, and repeat.

Then Thursday morning we met at a middle school near Cherry Creek State Park for some "Cruiser 200's" – on a track, jog 200 yards, run 200 yards at 5k-10k pace, and repeat. Both workouts ended up being about 6-7 miles with warm-up, workout and cool-down.

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Biggest thing I realized this week was I need to tone down my competitive nature during these "cardio and turnover" workouts. The goal is to get stronger and faster with each hill climb/200, so that your final one is a couple seconds faster than your first one. Well that's only possible if you give yourself room for improvement as you go, but my mindset is to try and keep up with the fastest group on the first run, and so far that has caused me to then fade as the workout goes on. From what I've been told, my best bet at getting a PR in the Rock-n-Roll half marathon will be to fight my temptation to go out too fast, but instead start out the first few miles at a comfortable and controlled pace and then get stronger as the race goes on. So I need to start developing that habit/mindset in the workouts.

Finally, I have a 2-week vacation coming up in about a week, I should be active during the trip, but probably won't be logging all the miles of the training plan. I'm not too concerned though, because I had a pretty strong base to start, and will still have 3 months to train when I get back.

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Mark Haas is a sports anchor/reporter for CBS4. Read his bio or follow him on Twitter @markhaastv or on Facebook.