Staying Motivated During This Season with Joe Klecker

Home-grown Minnesotan athlete, 9 time All-American and two time NCAA runner up, Joe Klecker, explains how he dealt with running in 2020. Some of his accomplishments include running a 3:58 mile, a 7:47 3k, and a 13:30 5k at the altitude in Boulder, Colorado.

How do you deal with disappointment and change?

I think it can be really hard, like a lot of times with races you have high expectations or even for workouts, but I think you just have to keep looking forward to the next opportunity. I know it’s a little hard now with COVID, but even still just with looking forward to the next workout or time trial, or hoping for the next season. But, I think it helps to have a short memory in terms of those disappointing races or workouts.

Can you talk to the idea of goal setting and feeling accomplished on your own without the structure of a season or scheduled races?

Obviously, it’s easy to set goals in terms of placing in a race or running a time, but now that’s a little harder. For me, once indoor was cancelled, I set more training goals and tried to be really consistent with training. So like for me, I usually train with my maximum mileage around 100 miles a week, and I wanted to just do that, run that many miles a week for, you know, 10-15 weeks. And that was my goal that was driving me because there were no races on the calendar and it was so uncertain. But when there would be, I just knew that if I set these training goals to be really consistent, eventually when races did come up, you know, I’d be ready to go.

(Photos taken by Bit Klecker)

If you were speaking directly to an audience of runners, what would you say?

Yeah, I mean I would just say that there’s really no better time now. To one, experiment with new training and two, really put in a good block of training because eventually the NCAA or the high school racing will resume and you’re either going to be, you know, if you use this time well, you could set yourself really far ahead or, you know, if you don’t, you might just be kind of where you’re at. And so that’s another way that I looked at this time frame too is you kind of have, I mean we’ve had months now just to really experiment with new training and just really try and become a new runner in a way.