The beauty of the track is that there is no hiding. She tells you exactly where you stand. There is no playing hard to get. There is no buying you dinner before she kicks you square in your gut and leaves you fighting for air with the taste of iron in your mouth. If you’ve been working hard, she’ll give you some fun, fast laps, but ONLY if you’ve showed her you’re committed.
And that’s really what it’s all about isn’t it? Would it really be worth it if it were easy? One of my favorite things about the track is the reward. Sure, she’ll leave you crying for your mommy if you haven’t prepared, but DAMN does it feel good when you’ve done your work and are just FLYING. Yes it still hurts, but having the guts to go out week after week, and watch those times tumble is one of the most honestly addicting things I’ve ever done.
Speed on the track is important because as a racer, who wins? Is it the person who can hold the highest heart rate? Is it the person who can hurt the most? Is it the person who can produce and/or clear the most lactic acid? Nope, none of those. It’s the person who can cover the distance in the least amount of time. The FASTEST.
So all the goofy little things that we use to try to guess what our “workload” is are really at best secondary or tertiary measures of what we really want to look at: speed. They are just data points to help us get closer to guessing what our speed is.
This is something we as athletes and coaches in a world thick with scientific studies and peer-reviewed papers published in the news can easily forget. We forget that the point of training isn’t to be good at training. The goal of training isn’t to have the most hours between 68 and 70% of your max heart rate. The point isn’t to spend as much time as possible at a blood lactate level of 3.99mmol/l. The point is to be the FASTEST. How do you measure speed? Distance and time. How then, are the best workouts measured? Distance and time.
So, get out to the track, and see if you handle the brutal, tough-love honesty of the oval. She will slap you and throw a drink in your face a couples times, but if you come back and prove your worth, she’ll reward you with a lifelong relationship based on pain and speed. And GOD is it worth it
