It never gets easier, it just gets worth it.

I read a familiar quote today from Greg Lemond:

"It never gets easier, you just get faster" 

This couldn't be more true.  Something I've sort of realized for a while but never really made the connections back to training.  When we start training from an off season or even for the first times in our lives, at first it sucks. Then it sucks some more. Eventually, it keeps sucking but you're going faster so you deem it "worth it." What ever that means.  There definitely is a period where you see huge fast gains in how good you feel while you run at a certain pace, but if you want to continue to improve... most likely it's going to continue to suck.

One of the most common activities among athletes that are building base and seeing quick results is over casting their goals.  We see big gains early, and think oh the race is still two months away, I should be able to go even faster by then!  The big problem here is realizing that the relationship of fitness gains, and output is not 1:1.  By that I mean you don't continue training at the same intensity and see the same percentage of gains.  It's a curve, so again "It never gets easier, you just get faster."  

I think one of the reasons this is such an important message is because a lot of times when you mentally prepare yourself for the start from the off season you find yourself mentally over compensating those two weeks where you know it's going to be hard, and under compensating the time after expecting it to be better.  Maintaining that mentality of training as being difficult is huge in my opinion. Now it's NOT okay to disobey your plan, or what your coach says during easy workouts. You have to pick your battles, but when the day comes you better be ready to take a page from the HTFU book and dig deep. So again "It never gets easier, you just get faster."  

Once we finally make it through the base, through the build, and onto the taper we finally have to apply all this HTFU-ing, in racing. I recently had an encounter with this "It never gets easier concept" during a race this weekend, I'll update on that later though. While we are racing whatever your event might be, it never gets easier no matter your plan. Negative splits, definitely not getting easier there. Downhill, from personal experience, NOT EASIER. Hills, it seems like they always kick at the end don't they? Definitely not easier. When a competitor decides that YOU are his PERSONAL competition... definitely not easier, but definitely faster.

I guess my point, with this thought clearing post of mine is that, we (or maybe just me) often expect things to get easier as we go.  As we get more experienced. That, however is not how it works. When you expect more results you have to give X^2 more effort. Settling for what X gives you as you become more experienced is just something I'm not ready to do.  I want to see huge gains in fitness, in PR's, in threshold, in W/Kg.  If I want to keep seeing these HUGE drops, I'm going to have to find ways to give X^2 more effort.