Staying Motivated

You have entered your off season, when you are no longer training for a race or hitting a personal goal. Now what? How do you stay motivated to continue running? What do your runs even look like?

Thankfully I am right in the middle of off season and coming back from an injury. So I currently have first hand experience on the struggles of continuing to run when there isn't a goal infront of you.

I was always someone who signed up for a race, trainied and when that race was over I would repeat that cycle never giving myself rest from training. Now here I am finally done recovering from surgery to repair a broken finger and I don't have a race planned for myself insight. At first the thought of not having a race to train for to keep me motivated gave me a lot of anxiety. After a while I realized how much my body both physically and mentally needed that break from racing, which lead me to find the joy in running again. I'm sure some of you reading this can relate to figuring out how much a break from training and racing can bring back the joy of running to just run.

Now that you have read a little bit about where I am at and hopefully some of you can relate, I will help you figure out how to stay motivated to run when you are in a similar situation.

The first thing I did was not putting any pressure on myself to hit a certain pace, to hit a certain amount of miles but to just go out an run for 30 minutes or whatever felt good for my body that day. By doing this it took away any feelings of escaping an uncomfortable situation and reinforced the fact that I was running to make myself feel good.

I then started incorporating some fun workouts that I might not do when I am training for a race, like doing more fartleks. Trying to mix things up more to help myself look forward to going out on my runs. This was something I would do before a run to help get me out the door that day. The technical term for this is an antecedent strategy which is just something you can do before you run that increases the likelihood of you going out for your run.

After finding the joy in running again, not putting pressure on myself and making my runs feel fun again, I had set myself up to increase my motivation to run in my off season. I hope these little tips are able to help you to continue running even when you aren't training for anything specfic.