Practice before you play

There’s a phrase that makes my teeth itch. What is it I hear you cry! Practice makes perfect. It grates on me for two reasons, 1) pursuit of perfection is fool’s errand and 2) the idea of perfectionism often leads to a blinkered and narrow mindset, removing a sense of perspective and ability to pivot.

I prefer this phrase, practice makes progress.

In a professional context, if your new role means more chairing of meetings, more influencing, more storytelling, more, well, anything, then perhaps some situational practice will help you get better at it. Make progress in fact.

It is often the unknown and the untested that causes most nervousness. Like how to handle a conversation or how to solve a problem. Moreover, it is often the expectations we weigh onto ourselves that cause that nervousness, the low level anxiety, to manifest deepest.

When it comes to running it is not too dissimilar.

Practice is just another word for training really. I am absolutely a fan of specificity in training to increase the likelihood of success in an event.

To bring to life in another context. I may be playing in a band. So I need to practice my musicianship. But what if I am practicing the guitar when I am going to be playing the drums. Yeah, I will know the songs and their structure, but I am not ready for the specific role I will be playing.

Same goes for running. If I am running a road marathon, in my training – my practice – I want to be indexing towards that kind of effort, conditions and training. If I am running a mountain race, I am gonna want to be thinking about what that entails and bring that to my training. The kit, the altitude, the terrain and so much more.

I am running a race at the end of November. It is a 70k trail run on a point-to-point route. I have a copy of the map and can study the course descriptions. It gives me insight. But that insight is second hand. Almost like being coached on how to but missing the first hand insight on having done so.

So, on Saturday morning Andy picked me up for a drive up to Hallyburton Woodland and I ran from there to Scone Palace. I learnt so much. The run was only 42k/26 miles with about 2,500ft/800m of climb. It looked pretty sedate on a map.

The reality was somewhat different. Here’s 10 things I learnt that will serve me well on the day:

1. The hills when they come are big and steep. One at 15%+ grade for over a mile. There’s 4 in this section I need to respect
2. There’s mud. Lots of it
3. There’s gates. Lots of them, and no two the same
4. The downhills are not opportunities to run hard in some places and I need to account for this in my race planning. They are slippy and steep
5. There’s a section at around 48k in the race through a field that is going be really tough. It is flat but a complete bog, and goes through gorse gorge. My legs looked like I lost a thousand fights with a thousand cats
6. I know where to push and where to be smart with effort
7. The few long tarmac sections will offer opportunity to stretch out the legs
8. I have an idea of where and when to take on nutrition
9. My pack loaded with mandatory kit is a good fit
10. I need to go and do the first 30k for greater insight

Without this insight I could run into (no pun intended) some negative mindset and unexpected challenges on the day. In essence, the list above basically says I am more informed now and can adapt my strategy on race day as a result.

It is hard to put a figure on it but this practice run will save me lots of time on the day in both readiness and reaction. And it doubled as a really strong training run. I also know my easy runs for the next few weeks need to be more on trail. The like differences between that and road, especially at this time of year, are amplified in the heat of battle.

This week’s practice has definitely set me up for some progress.