Karen writes: Selfish

To train for Ironman you have to be a bit selfish.  But also realistic, there are some things in life that trump training, you have to be flexible but it doesn't mean it's easy to be entirely grown up about it all the time.

I had planned a long bikeride this morning, got up early for a big breakfast of rice porridge, sorted the bike out, put the water bottles in their cages, sandwiches were packed and I was standing at the door dressed and ready to go when then the Coastguard locator went off, W had an urgent call-out.  Ok, I'm never-ever-ever going to say "let them drown" but after I stood on the deck watching that little rescue boat go racing off for who knows what and who knows how long, I selfishly couldn't help but think about how HARD it was to get out of bed early on this holiday morning, and how much trickier training was if you couldn't do it when and how you wanted.  All that and of course the fact that I had eaten twice my normal calories for breakfast and now wasn't going to use them.  On this beautiful clear, still morning, I put the bike back in the shed, took off my cycling gear, made breakfast for the girls, and finally remembered that I was lucky enough to have choices and faced the spin-bike or nothing dilemma.

I looked at my training plan, aha, there was a 90 minutes spin on another day, so I substituted that for today's planned long ride and moved the long ride to Friday. I just do not do strenuous spin sessions at home so I figured that I could also tuck the run I missed yesterday in this afternoon...if I was careful about what I ate for lunch...ie, no bacon and egg croissants.  YES, this would work out alright!  I sound a bit blasé when I talk about mucking around with my training plan, I'm not really, you have to be very careful not to 'stack' the tougher sessions so they are too close to each other, this is really important for me because if I tire myself out  too much I can take a week to recover with the hypothyroid thing, I make sure I'm not doing excessive amounts of one discipline one day after another to reduce injury risk and I always try to keep the rest day (or days!) where most useful.

So spin was spent sort-of concentrating on low resistance, high cadence, and of course reading my book at the same time. Then I took the girls swimming and I tried not to be too energetic, much to their disappointment, they usually like to be towed along on their boogie boards...I call it strength training.  At 3pm I went for an 80 minute run in the bush, that was difficult in the heat but it's good to practice in all conditions.  So after my little sulk I'm actually doing ok this week with the training plan, well, I'm ticking things off, not necessarily as intended but that's life. Happily no-one did drown this morning out at Kawakawa bay, but I just hope the weather is ok for the now Friday long ride, and of course there aren't any more urgent interruptions.

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