Today brought home the wonderful power of the mind, again! I think I am pretty dof in that I have to learn the same lessons again and again. I have ranted here in the past about the importance of goals that are realistic, achievable and yet a stretch. For the last ten years (or perhaps all of my life), I have wanted to run a sub 20 minute five kilometre run. The closest I have gotten is to just break 21 minutes.

Last week I was reading the Runner’s World Magazine and read with great interest about an Ethiopian, Haile Gebrselassie, who has become the first man to run a marathon in under two hours and five minutes twice. He recently smashed the world record and just missed out on breaking it again in his last race. Now the thing that really interested me is that in order to run that time he would have had to run for 42km at 2 minutes 57 seconds per kilometre. This means that he runs at faster than 20 kph. This man is a machine!!

Here I was thinking that a sub four minute five kilometre run was pretty good. Suddenly a bright light dawned in my skull and I realised that actually it is nowhere good enough. So mentally I shifted my goal posts. I thought that I must be able to run far faster than I am and so I set my new time to achieve as five kilometres in less than 19 minutes. A paltry 3 minutes 48 seconds a kilometre.

OK, so there are plenty of numbers in my writing so far but please stay with me. I have had a cold this last week and so have been really frustrated by my inability to get out onto the road with this new found goal and insight. By this morning, I was going to run, cold or not! Out I went and ran six kilometres at 4:00 per kilometre. This is something I have never been able to do and yet this morning with no training and a handy cold, I was able to run my best time in my life!!

The point about all of this running jargon and the nifty calculations is that we set our own limits. How sad and silly that we constrain ourselves when we could just push our barriers a little further away and then surpass what we thought was unachievable. My head is still spinning as the 4 minutes per kilometre thing was a utopian goal for me, one I did not really think I would ever achieve. Just realising that it was a pretty easy goal snapped something in my brain and allowed me to go out an achieve it. As I have blogged before – success in our endeavours comes mainly from our attitude! A lesson that I have re-learnt, again! I have my 19 minute goal in my sights and cannot wait to move those goal posts again!

So go and take one of your impossible goals, make it even tougher and then go out and surprise yourself!