This is the time of the year to finetune the body, including the muscular system – in reality if the muscles cannot perform the contractions at the rate needed it does not help how much you have trained during the winter. It really does not help to have a great engine if you have no wheels..
They need to be very soft in resting position while at the same time able to rapidly contract. Alot of athletes have their muscules in constant tension, and therefore cannot go from this soft resting position to hard contractions within the short period of time needed. Therefore they end up feeling “dead” all the time with no forward moving force.
Spoke to one of the other Norwegian long distance runners about this yesterday. And after checking his quad muscles and they were very, very tight – I asked him if he did not notice this as he was now struggling in his running. He replied “not really”. So I asked him to first lift his own quad muscle sideways and feel the tension there, and afterwards take the same grip on mine. His comment : “wow, your muscles are untrained” :))) great comment, I never knew an untrained could run 13.06 🙂 But it does illustrate a common misconception You do not have to be tight to have “worked hard” You should instead have maximum capacity to fire on those soft muscles from when there is a need to…
Gotta run now, out in the nice weather..
All well from here,
Marius