I didn’t have a second place finish in mind when I started the Midnight Moose 100 mile trail race back in September. I didn’t set any speed records during the race but made relentless forward progress. I started to move up the rankings during the second night of the race – my second night in a row of not sleeping. I have been anxious about sleep for most of my life so you can imagine my surprise when I realized that I was handling sleep deprivation better than most racers. I steadily moved into second place during the last part of Midnight Moose by simply sticking with my pace. I used staying power to hang in the race and good things happened for me.
It took a long time to sink in that I finished in second place. In six years of racing, I never finished in the top 10 of any race. During these years, I was constantly improving my diet and my training. I was stacking small changes on top of each other which helped me steadily improve my running. In the end, it was a small change that was the key to breaking the top 10 in a race. I recently read an interesting analogy that relates to this. Consider someone who is saving money in an effort to be rich. They save dollar after dollar every day. What is the exact dollar that this person collects that makes them rich? It’s hard to tell but it’s clear that if this person continues to save money, they will be considered rich one day. It’s the same thing with training and nutrition. It’s hard to tell which small change to your training and diet is going to get you to the next level but it’s guaranteed that your efforts will pay off if you continue to make improvements.
Eliminating snacks from my diet was my small change that made a huge difference. I was snacking on a good amount of peanut butter everyday. It doesn’t sound like a big deal but quitting these snacks for 3 months helped me lose 15 pounds before the Midnight Moose.
Suffice it to say that my second place finish wouldn’t have happened if I had not stayed with my training and nutrition. I kept doing all of the right things with my training but needed to make a relatively small change in my nutrition to get me to the next level. That’s where the magic comes in with sticking with your goals. You put yourself in a position to have a major breakthrough with a small change. All of the small things that you do everyday add up until one thing puts you over the edge.
