How Bad Do You Want It?
Life really gave me a beating this week. Training has been hard. I ran my longest interval last week (35 minutes) and completely blew up! And then I did it again on Monday. I started out fine but something snapped and I blew up again! And I hurt...knee pain, hip pain, you name it, I've got it. Nothing bad enough to make me stop but just enough to make me very aware that if I'm not careful I'll soon be sitting on the sidelines waiting for an injury to heal.
That's just the training. Add to that the schedule from hell where on a good day I succeed in only nodding off in class instead of completely falling asleep because of my work schedule, the fact that I am officially three weeks behind on my reading schedule, and screwing up a project at work. Can we say stress overload?
I spent half the week wondering if I can REALLY do this tri thing with everything else on my plate and the other half of it redesigning my training program. I switched the week up when it was obvious that blowing up two days in a row had left me exhausted and my sleep schedule wasn't helping. So I'd already had the one unexpected event that I had allotted for the week. With only one off-day scheduled every week, one unexpected thing can happen without disrupting my regime. So I was quite frustrated when I dragged myself out of bed at 4:30AM on my day off to swim with the triathletes at the gym I work for and arrived to discover my swimsuit, goggles, and swim cap were missing.
See, the beauty of working at a gym is you get a locker. The crappy part is that in a building that services a university, athletics, and PE, when a team needs a locker they take yours. So my stuff had been cleaned out by the over-anxious Equipment Manager and has been misplaced! My first thought was "great! I'm at the end of my training week and I'm going to fail to make my training goal because of this retarded and incompetent set back?!" I wanted to quit - after all if I can't do this right then why tri at all? I'm as slow as a turtle anyway so getting my training time in is imperative and it's not as if I don't have a million other things to deal with.
But then I stopped and took a deep breath and realized that the beauty of tri-ing is when something retarded happens in one sport you have two others to fall back on. So I took the opportunity to go for a little run. I was afraid of blowing up again but I set out at a slow and deliberate pace and decided to tackle the rolling hill course and just focus on keeping my RPE down to a reasonable level. I didn't worry about time or speed - I just focused on feeling. I ran...one song...two songs...I lost track of the number of songs....that number of songs plus one....and when I finished the loop I looked at my watch...50 minutes! Yes, that's right...I was passed by every runner on the trail but one but I ran for 50 minutes without stopping and I DIDN'T blow up!
I'm feeling the pain tonight but I made my point to the tri and it made it's point to me: if you want it, you've got to work for it...it's gonna hurt, it's not going to go the way you want it to but if you stick to it and observe your boundaries, the reward will be well worth it and one day you'll find you can go farther and faster than you ever imagined you could!
Life really gave me a beating this week. Training has been hard. I ran my longest interval last week (35 minutes) and completely blew up! And then I did it again on Monday. I started out fine but something snapped and I blew up again! And I hurt...knee pain, hip pain, you name it, I've got it. Nothing bad enough to make me stop but just enough to make me very aware that if I'm not careful I'll soon be sitting on the sidelines waiting for an injury to heal.
That's just the training. Add to that the schedule from hell where on a good day I succeed in only nodding off in class instead of completely falling asleep because of my work schedule, the fact that I am officially three weeks behind on my reading schedule, and screwing up a project at work. Can we say stress overload?
I spent half the week wondering if I can REALLY do this tri thing with everything else on my plate and the other half of it redesigning my training program. I switched the week up when it was obvious that blowing up two days in a row had left me exhausted and my sleep schedule wasn't helping. So I'd already had the one unexpected event that I had allotted for the week. With only one off-day scheduled every week, one unexpected thing can happen without disrupting my regime. So I was quite frustrated when I dragged myself out of bed at 4:30AM on my day off to swim with the triathletes at the gym I work for and arrived to discover my swimsuit, goggles, and swim cap were missing.
See, the beauty of working at a gym is you get a locker. The crappy part is that in a building that services a university, athletics, and PE, when a team needs a locker they take yours. So my stuff had been cleaned out by the over-anxious Equipment Manager and has been misplaced! My first thought was "great! I'm at the end of my training week and I'm going to fail to make my training goal because of this retarded and incompetent set back?!" I wanted to quit - after all if I can't do this right then why tri at all? I'm as slow as a turtle anyway so getting my training time in is imperative and it's not as if I don't have a million other things to deal with.
But then I stopped and took a deep breath and realized that the beauty of tri-ing is when something retarded happens in one sport you have two others to fall back on. So I took the opportunity to go for a little run. I was afraid of blowing up again but I set out at a slow and deliberate pace and decided to tackle the rolling hill course and just focus on keeping my RPE down to a reasonable level. I didn't worry about time or speed - I just focused on feeling. I ran...one song...two songs...I lost track of the number of songs....that number of songs plus one....and when I finished the loop I looked at my watch...50 minutes! Yes, that's right...I was passed by every runner on the trail but one but I ran for 50 minutes without stopping and I DIDN'T blow up!
I'm feeling the pain tonight but I made my point to the tri and it made it's point to me: if you want it, you've got to work for it...it's gonna hurt, it's not going to go the way you want it to but if you stick to it and observe your boundaries, the reward will be well worth it and one day you'll find you can go farther and faster than you ever imagined you could!
posted by Habeela at 4:19 PM
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