Governing Principles: Quality Time

It is interesting for me to think that 'mileage' was once the title of this blog in light of the circumstances that I am planning on banishing that concept from my mind space.

I'm guilty of mileage obsession: an unhealthy fascination with the distance I move my body in the semi-forward direction.

To be clear:  my goal in 2012 is to race better, NOT log  extreme miles.

To be clear:  I'll probably log extreme miles, but this is only a consequence of a paradigm shift from distance to time.  Mileage happens as a product of concentrated will.

Quality time:  this is my sole concern.

The most successful hours logged in a week can be spent on bike performance, sometimes on lactate threshold work, and sometimes on long slow, miles.  Notice, only two out of the three deal with logging actual miles.

So the first step in banishing this mis-step in my self evaluation is to fess up and acknowledge that I am a mileage junky.

I develop a sense of self worth from bragging about high numbers of miles.

There I said it.  And it sounds f@cking even more crazy out loud.  Try it.  Are you a mileage junky?

Did you forget what training is about in your perspective, too?

It's about spending quality time with your body and self as you ready yourself for a specific event.  Or not even for an event.  It's about the workout, start to finish -- one workout at a time. 

Miles are a subset...the event the super set of your 'being' while training.  Period.

Of course I will go on 18 or 42 mile runs, but I will not log every single mile on it as if that guaranteed my success.

Concentrated Efforts of Will. CEW.  That is the unit I'll be measuring 2012.

CEW = are periods of time where my body and mind are fully focused on co-development.