I was reading this book about cycling training because I was bored at work today. I was flipping around and I saw this section about this thing called, "No Man's Land".
No Man's Land is training at about 80 to 85% of your maximum heart rate, or in more practical terms, No Man's Land is that steady, typical, bread-and-butter pace that you build into on a normal training run. You don't feel easy but at the end you don't feel worn out either. It's a pace that makes you feel like you've put in a decent effort--helps you sleep at night.
But this book and a bunch of other elite cycling coaches claimed that training at this pace is absolutely useless. It's a pitfall. What happens when you train at this pace is that you aren't helping your body get comfortable with race pace while at the same time you are working too hard to allow your body to recover. Your stressing the upper end of your comfort. You aren't getting out of your comfort zone while simultaneously working your comfort zone too hard.
What the book argued is that you should take your easy days super easy and make your hard days super hard. Well, I do the exact opposite of that. I have a bought a cabin in No Man's Land and I train there year round.
I see the logic behind the book's argument. If you're going to race, you should do work at that race pace or harder and everything else should be about recovery at a pace that stresses your aerobic system. That would be the ideal way to race.
But, if I may defend my No Man's Land training. First of all, it feels good. If you see running as a sort of self-medicating process, which I do, there's nothing better than pounding out a hard effort at the end of the day.
More importantly, I don't see myself as an easy/hard type of person. I'm a grinder. Easy/hard has too many ups and downs in both life and running. I would much rather just set the pace at comfortably hard and grind for hours and days and years and decades so that I'm not even climbing, I'm just waiting for the world to change around me. I like routine. I like the quiet, tiring satisfaction of putting in an honest effort every single day.
But there's also a madness in it that appeals to me. It's an attraction to the mind-numbing monotony and repetition. No highs. No lows. Just keeping a pace no matter what. When you really get down to it, when you really cut to the bone of it you realize it's not human at all. It's a loss of self. The No Man's Land training is this place you can reach regardless of how you feel or how the conditions are. To the point where how you feel doesn't even really matter. You don't have a say in it. The pace, the grinding pace is all that matters and it will be met today and the next day and the next day.
Easy/hard is...personal, in a way. Everyone has highs and lows. That's not how I like my stress though. I can't have total stress and total relaxation, I'm equally terrified by both. I want to slowly press all the time until whatever is in my way just crumbles out of boredom or forgets what it was doing in the first place. It has a tortuous quality to it.
A steady, ceaseless push until all that's left is...friggin' diamond dinner plates with John Cleese and Frank Shorter high-fiving in the center.
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That's just how I see myself in life though. In anything I do. I will show up. I will always show up. I will put in a productive amount of work and a sufficient, thoughtful amount of effort and then I will show up the next day and do that again. Just grind through it. No more. No less. No special days. No bad days. Just me all the time and no cake on your birthday.
Work- grind.
Running- grind.
Relationships- grind.
Dancing- grind.
Writing- grind.
Comedy- grind.
I will be there. I will do it. If not, I don't want to bother with it at all. I'm like a very low energy robot-dog that is trying to destroy the world by digging to the Earth's core from out in the backyard.
Or like a solar-powered robot-bear who owns a bakery and makes a designated amount of cakes every day until he reaches enough cakes to blow up the Earth's core.
Or like a hydrogen-powered donkey trying to learn the German language by memorizing five words from the Robot to German dictionary every day...until he blows up the Earth's core.
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