Maybe it was the two beers I had a dinner last night, but I didn't wake up mentally sharp and lacked focus. I was up early enough to get to the pool for an early morning swim or weights but I just couldn't motivate myself to go. I figured I'll do it later. As the day wore on I started to feel mentally tired. At lunch time I went to the bike shop to get my gear indexing fixed. It only took them 5 minutes to find the cable that slipped and fix it. When I got back to work I started feeling worse and worse as the day went on.
For the past few days I've been hungry and eating regularly. Yesterday I started to notice that my body is starting to get leaner, especially around the mid section. I'm 8 weeks into my race training and my muscles are changing. The first few weeks of the plan I felt completely out of shape, even though I was averaging 350 miles a month of training during the off season, then the following few weeks I started to feel I had gotten in shape, and now in the past 10 days I'm feeling that I'm making my muscles grow stronger. For the past week my legs have been tender to the touch but I can still train hard on them. I know training through the pain and tenderness is when I make quantum performance gains. For example, earlier today, Reid gave me a light punch to my quad and I almost jumped out of my skin in pain and then 3 hours later I'm doing aggressive leg weight training.
When I left work I was going to go to the Y to do weights. As I was driving there I decided to turn in the opposite direction and go home. I was so mentally tired I couldn't even push myself to do it. When I got home all I could think about was having to do my training and when would I do it? I was dreading doing my swim and weights tonight. I was playing all the options in my mind, do I do both sessions tonight? or one session tonight? or both tomorrow? I was then thinking if I moved any sessions to tomorrow, then the entire weekend would feel like training and that wouldn't be fair to the family. I just couldn't visualize myself training tonight.
For dinner I was craving a hamburger, so Alice and I went and got one. Instead of fries I had a salad and afterwards I started feeling better. When we got home I dropped Alice off and took a deep breath and just drove to the Y. On the way I was thinking that I shouldn't think anything negative about training and that I need to just understand that it is a way of life that is non negotiable and that seemed to help. When I got to the Y I realized that I forgot my watch. For a moment I thought this could be my excuse why I didn't swim tonight because I typically use it to keep track of how many laps I've done and without a watch I'd have to try to count how many laps I did in my head. I thought about it for about 5 seconds, and thought that Olympic Champions of the past never had watches, and decided to swim anyways.
I ended up doing a 3000 meter swim and it was a great swim. I don't know how fast I was going but it felt fast and as my arms got sore I was able to push through the pain. There was a 20 something year old in the lane beside me with a lean swimmers body and a pretty good swimmer. He was only swimming very slightly faster than me. I was really enjoying the swimming through the pain sensation. Although I hate thinking about having to do my swimming workout, inevitably when I'm about half way through it I tend to enjoy it. After the swim I was just able to squeeze my weight training session in before the Y closed.
I was really proud of myself that I overcame my lack of motivation and feelings and completed my training anyways. Getting mentally prepared to do a race is fairly easy because of the anticipation and hours of training preparation , but grinding out a training session when you really don't want to do it is my definition of an "Ironman". Truth be told, on days like this, having the blog is a blessing. I'd rather do the training, no matter how tough it is, rather than write excuses about why I didn't do the training.
The photo I attached today is of the calendar I'm using to keep me focused on eating well. Green is good, yellow is chocolate, fried foods or snacks, and pink is alcohol. One of the guys on twitter told me I should focus on eating well 3 days a week to start. I thought that was interesting because I understood the psychology for training and yet I've never heard about that method for eating.
Tempo Swim - 1:08 / 3000 meters
Weights - 40:00
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