three things thursday
In order....
1. Swim. My back got crunchy and twisty after Cedar Point, and then as stress descended all of my normal extra optional swims got pitched. That means I've only been in the pool a couple of times in the past few weeks. On the one hand, when I showed up on Sunday to swim with Caroline for a small chunk of hundreds, my incredibly rested shoulders pumped out some surprising times. On the other hand, I feel like I've really lost my feel for the water and am flailing a bit. I'm looking forward to a ton of time in the pool this winter and maybe, finally, possibly joining a master's group to give me the beat-down I need to make progress.
2. Bike. Motivation is rock-bottom. I love riding when it's cool and brisk, but the crazy weather-roulette of the past couple of weeks has meant that I've ended up doing some rides in the under-50º weather and it's destroying any desire I have to really be on the bike. I missed more than a few rides in September while trying to balance life stress against training stress, and I feel like I'm in this spiral of feeling guilty and worried about the training I've missed, which then makes me want to hide in bed, so I miss more training, so I berate myself some more...and so on. And there is absolutely no way that I'm in a good mental space to hop on the trainer and bang out a 3.5 hour ride right now. I'm ready for a little break from the bike before the aerobic winter trainer work starts showing up on my schedule. I've finally wrapped my head around the fact that all of this is pretty normal based on the roller-coaster of the past few months, but I'm counting down the days until next weekend, when I can "race" and then hide the bike away for a while.
3. Run. After accidentally giving myself a pretty bad case of shin splints because I'm an idiot that doesn't track shoe mileage, I ended up taking ten days off entirely from running. Monday I did a short birthday run with the poet, and I did another one yesterday, but I haven't run longer than 3 miles in...ugh...quite some time now. I'll do a longer run tomorrow and an even longer one this weekend in between hanging out with giggly friends and drinking my face off picking up after Lauren celebrating a wedding, but I'm going into next weekend's race on some pretty under-trained legs. I had a couple of great long runs in September so I'm just going to have to hope that those pull me through to another 2+ hour half marathon after some downstream swimming and flat riding.
The sum total of all of these updates is that I'm looking forward to being done racing triathlon for the season. I'm not burned out on training, exactly, it's more that I've been ready for a big aerobic block for about a month now. I want to settle into winter training, I want long sets in the pool and lots of easy runs and very short trainer rides and, God help me, MAF tests ahoy. And I actually considered not racing next weekend, but Sonja talked me off the ledge reminded me that I have a year of fitness to rely on and while I'll probably be missing some top-end speed (ha, like I have speed), now that my cold is gone I can go out and have a fun day. No time goals, no pressure, no worrying, just enjoy one final hurrah.
And with that, friendly friends, I'm going to crawl back in bed and wait until it warms up to go ride. Happy Thursday!