Hitting the wall requires ribs and beer...

I think I'm getting burnt out. The fatigue started after yesterdays long bike and brick run. Rather than start to taper for next weeks race, I was still following my base building plan for Clearwater in November. I know I was taking a risk.

This morning with a little twinge of soreness in my back, I finally got in the water. It was the first time in a week. The back felt okay but was still tight because it hadn't been in the water in a while. Surprisingly, I felt good and didn't loose any speed. But I did crack my head on the wall of the pool.

I was at a different pool, mine is closed for maintenance, and this one doesn't have the flags above the water that let you know the wall is close. I was warming up with some backstroke, with my mind on auto pilot, and "wham", my head smacked the pool wall. Boy did that hurt! Not to mention my embarrassment.

Right away I tried to swim like nothing happened, but you feel the head shockwave for the entire swim. Even now, sitting here, I have phantom pains. Oh, and one other thing, when you scrape your knee, then swim for an hour, it really pusses up. But that's not the worst part. The worst part is when the puss dries it has sharp edges and hurts like hell when it touches something, like your clothes. And of course you can't stop touching it, and picking at it, and then it even hurts more. I'm actually glad I didn't swim since I scraped it, I avoided a lot of dry puss scraping pain.

I was really debating how far I should run today. Do I do my 2 hour base building run or do I do my normal 35 minute taper run? I waited and debated all day. Before I ran, I went to the Burlington Rib Fest. It is the largest in Canada. It's a whole bunch of guys that make ribs and then compete to see who has the best ribs. These guys come from all over Canada and the U.S. to compete. It's a major deal.

The crowds where huge, especially since it was such a nice day. There was thousands of people there and we had to wait in line at least 20 minutes to get our ribs. Normally we go and will eat the ribs at the festival. With so many people, the tables were full and we decided to order and take them home. I figured I'll do my run before I eat them. If I ate them and had a couple of beers I'd probably be burping up ribs and beer. Plus, I didn't want to do a long run in the dark again this week.

I went for my run and still hadn't decided how far I was going to go. At one point I figured I'd go for an hour and a half, then I decided on an hour and twenty minutes. Right from the start I was feeling burnt out and I was running so slow. The heart rate was fine but my legs didn't have much in them.

At the 50 minute point, my front hip was starting to bother me. I wasn't sure if it was because of my back being sore or that I had a fuel belt on. I rarely wear a fuel belt and thought the jiggling may have irritated it. I then thought that "I'm 6 days from race day, what am I doing? I should taper. Do I want to get injured? Wouldn't that be stupid. I'm not going to benefit one bit from more training, why push it?". At that point I called Alice on my iPhone and she came and picked me up.

I got a solid hour in and it was mostly up hill, so I got a good workout. But even though I did over 2 hours of training today, I feel a little guilty cutting the run short. Not a lot of guilt, but a little. Isn't that stupid? And to get over it, I'm going to have some ribs and beer right after blogging. Okay, I lied, I'm going to have ribs. I'm already drinking the beer at this moment. It's the ultimate recovery food. For the rest of the week I'm officially on vacation, er, I mean taper.

By the way, if you enlarge today's picture, you'll see a marker on the glass. I has a line at the top saying full, and one in the middle saying empty. I loved it the first time I saw it this week while having beers Jack Astor's, so I borrowed it.

Long Swim - 1:05:48 / 3000 meters

Long Run - 1:00:11 / 7.31 miles / 8:14 pace / 132 avg hr

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