A tale of two voices

...in which I talk about running. Again.

So, first things first - I'm still in my target weight range (I was exactly at my target on Monday's weigh-in), and still enjoying being fitter and having more energy. Still sticking to the Slimming World plan, with maybe a few extra syns here and there and extra cheese. Mmmm, cheese...

Sorry, drifted off into a bit of a cheese related reverie there. Where was I?

Oh yes, running. Today is a training day. I have to have a proper training plan and stuff if I'm going to run a marathon next year (which I am), so I run 3 times a week; 2 short runs and one longer one at the weekend, although the 2 short runs are always over 5 miles now and today my short run was 7.85 miles. (Side note: it wasn't that long ago that I'd have considered that an insanely long distance).

I always decide on the route I'm going to run before I start so that I know what I'm aiming for, but I've noticed that while I'm running there are two voices in my head. I think the one comes more or less straight from my legs, and says things like "you don't need to go so far today, you already did extra the other day. You can slow down a bit, too, your pace is well over what it needs to be at this point in your training. You can stop now and walk for a bit, it's fine."

The other one tends to say things like "come on, you can do this. You've run further than this before with no problem so there's no reason to stop. Up the pace a bit, you can smash your target for the marathon at this rate. Don't you dare even think about stopping to walk you little maggot."

I think most people probably have analogues of these voices for most activities; I certainly do. The one is the one that says things like "eat the pizza! Drink the wine! Have a cigarette!" when you're trying to lose weight or give up smoking, versus "you had pizza already this week. You've had enough wine for one day. No, you've given up, don't start again."

(Note - if you've ever given up smoking, you know that it's not something that you just do once, you do it every day. The addiction fades, but the desire is still there; what keeps you an ex-smoker is that you don't give in to it).

I suppose you might call the one of them temptation and the other one willpower. What I've found is that the more often you give in to temptation, the harder it is next time; the more often your willpower wins, the easier it gets to resist temptation because you get rewards from the willpower winning that are usually better than what you'd have got if you gave in.

I'm pretty sure there was a point to this post somewhere but it seems to have slipped my mind...