Sergey Bubka was a world record pole vaulter in the 1980s who broke the indoor and outdoor record like 30 times. When he did set the record it was a centimeter at a time; he clearly could have jumped higher each time but there was no motivation to do so. The Soviet sports federation paid him a bonus every time he set a record. Mo records mo money.
Now that I do not have Mike breathing down my neck and posting times at which I can aim, I have to motivate myself to get faster but I don't want to set the bar too high too quickly. If I run some really fast time (relatively speaking) like 43 minutes for 6 miles now it will be hard for me to top that without a painful effort. And I will psyche myself out to not even try to top it to avoid the potential pain.
So I am taking the Bubka approach of incrementally running faster - today I ran 6 miles in 45.40 which is about 12 seconds faster than I ran a week ago. Felt good and I had the glow of improvement.
This goes out the window when Mike pops a 43 minute time and I look like a moron. Then I move to the Bob Beamon space shot approach.
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