Performance

In Portugal we woke up early every morning, trained and ate, or ate and then trained. We'd come back from training, buy fresh bread at the bakery, eat on the balcony, and then sleep for a few hours. Around 4:30 or so in the afternoon we would train again, eat dinner, sit around, maybe drink hot chocolate somewhere, and be in bed again by 10:00. The two weeks in Portugal were about running. I got to be a runner and I didn't have to be anything else. In Portugal I wasn't an exchange student who still wants to see all of the Netherlands, I wasn't a daughter who was away from home and wants constant contact with her friends and parents, I wasn't a student who has to study for a test. Because I wasn't anything other than a runner, I performed better than I have all year- or ever.
When I called my dad after we got back from Portugal and told him how we spent our days, he started going on about how the ancient Greeks were right when they said that athletes are actually lazy, because the only thing they do is train. I'm not sure where he got the whole ancient Greeks thing from, but it's true that we trained better because we did absolutely nothing else. Here, we all have normal lives with working, going to school, and doing things with people who aren't runners. Of course we trained better in Portugal without all of the other distractions. But being able to perform came from the atmosphere too. There were about fifteen of us in Portugal from the youth team accompanied by two coaches and one of the coaches wives- our "mom" while we were there. The other athletes in the youth team are driven. It's not "cool" not to want to train, or to stay up late eating tons of junk food, and not caring about how running goes. The fastest most dedicated people are the ones who are the most respected by the rest of us, and all of us want the same thing: to run faster.
Besides the youth team, Team Distance Runners had a group of 40 or so other athletes who were all in the same hotel as us. This is the group of runners that TDR is known for: the marathoners that are going to run in the European Championships in Barcelona this summer, the 40 runners with championship medals, and all of the athletes that have medals and championships coming soon. Everyone in the youth team wants to be one of them someday.
It's all those little things that added up to being able to perform in Portugal: resting well, eating well, spending time with the other athletes, and being able to focus on running and nothing else.

Occasionally when you run there's these moments where something clicks, and even when your legs are burning and your panting, you feel unstoppable. Then you're living in the moment, not thinking about how much longer you have to run, or about anything besides the way you feel in that split second and the way that your body's moving. Then you're flying over the track, and you never want it to end.
Those are performance moments, and they make all the moments when you can't peform- when you don't want to get out of bed and train, or when you skip the going out late and the chocolate cake- completely worth it. Portugal was full of performance moments. Maybe I'm greedy to ask, but I want more of them. I want performance moments in every race I have while I'm still here. I want to run personal records, and feel that flying unstoppable feeling. I'm trying so hard to hold on to the feeling of Portugal and to not forget what all those performance moments were like.

Performance moments or not, I know that the year I've had training with TDR has been one of the best things I've ever done. I don't need to run any certain times or win any races to know that- but still, performance would be nice.

So it's decided: I'm going to perform.