Adjusted Reality

This is the week – 6 days from now, I’ll be done with my first triathlon of the year.  I’m targeting this one as my A race for the first half of the year because the weather is perfect, I’m pretty specifically trained for it, and I feel primed and ready.  It’s weird doing that with a few other races on the horizon before I go gently into the good summer off-season, but whatevs.  This year is an experiment.

I’ve definitely beaten the dead horse about talking about my training accomplishments, but I do well drawing from recent past successes.  So, I’m going to list them here for myself to remember.

Swim:

• Biggest volume week (over 10km), and largest pool swim ever (over 4k yards)
• Longer swims.  1 hour+ and 2500m+ became the norm, not the exception.
• Three wetsuit swims in the lake within the last week and a half
• Have swam in the chop and the cold this year – so I can handle if the day throws me that.

Expectations: I’m looking at the swim as a warmup.  Of course I’d like to do well but this is definitely my least improved section of the tri in 2014 – I just haven’t focused on it.  I have zero expectations beyond keeping my effort honest.

Bike:

• Besides last weekend’s ride of blergh, I’ve had some pretty decent outdoor riding.  Most notably 16.3 mph for a fairly easy-pace metric in March (the same one that I rode at 13.6 mph last year), and a 25 miler two weekends ago that was close to 17 mph in traffic.
• Actually making an effort to ride hard on the trainer.  Endurance Ride videos, Sufferfests, just pushing myself on my own – I feel better prepared only having done a handful of rides outdoors.
• My triple brick bike pace from last year improved by 1.5 – 2 mph.  Love that – I can see straight improvement there – doing the same workout on the same settings at the same time of day as last year.
• On top of this I’ve maintained a better bike volume for the race miles I’m doing (about 80% of the time I trained on average from the 5 months before Kerrville, and 40 miles is about 70% of 56 miles).  I considered last year a BIG bike build year, so this is pretty good.  I also counted the time, not miles, because trainer miles lie.

Expectations: This is a big question mark.  I’ve done exactly zero outdoor rides really pushing myself in any significant way, so we’ll see.  Also, the course is always going up or down.  Nothing looks super bad, just “Texas hills” (which outside of Austin means speed bumps, usually), but we’ll see if those “hills” equate to the feeling of false flats that I’m really good at, or feel like actual climbing which I’m not.

Run:

• Night and day, this went from my weakest link to my strongest link in the tri.  My attitude has changed from feeling weaker as the tri goes on to feeling stronger.
• I run like a rockstar off the bike lately – two 7:43 miles after triple bricks.  My absolute best triple brick 3-mile average was 8:45 per mile.  This year, it was 7:53 for the 3 miles.  Almost a full minute better.
• Looks like everything’s about 1 minute per mile better as well.  Last year I had a few runs in the 10s, most runs in the 11s, and some in the 12s.  This year, I physically cannot run in the 12s.  It pains me.  My feet no longer are willing to go that slow.  11s are reserved for recovery runs.  A lot of times my first mile or so will be there but it’s hard for me to stay there unless we’re truly prancing and chatting and frolicking.  10s are my homies.  9s are good days.
• I ran 3 double digit races this year sub-10 min miles.  One with a pretty hilly profile.  I came within 45 seconds of my 13.1 PR and smashed my 10 mile by almost 3 minutes.
• 12 out of the first 16 weeks of the year, I ran 20-25 miles.  Hells yeah, consistency.  It doesn’t sound like much, but it’s helping me stay injury free, I think, and improving my pace.

Expectations: I am going to dominate this run.  I’ve run in the cold, I’ve run in the heat, I’ve run hills, I’ve run on flats, I’ve run on trails, I’ve run on concrete, I’ve ran off hard bikes, I’ve ran after swims.  I do like my run this year, I do, I do, Quix I am.  Fuck yeah!

And, a less type-A approach…

Overall, the last month, I’ve been working on a little more of an intrinsic, intuitive approach to everything.  I seem to be a little burned out on being so type A with the food tracking and the diet quality and the stats and reports and quantification.  I typically love that shit, so when it started being a chore instead of a challenge, I kinda decided to pitch it for a while.

I haven’t tracked my food quality or my calories in weeks.  I’m tracking my workouts, because I still enjoy that, but some have been sans garmin, or at least without a care to what it says (just using it for mileage tracking).  Last week, I weighed in at 175.2, which matches my low weight for the year, and my workouts still seem to be quality, so I’m just going to go with it.

I guess, what I’m trying to say, is I’m working on reaching inside, and really asking myself things like:

1. What level of effort am I at right now?  Where should I be?

2. Is what you really need a bag of pretzels? (post workout Saturday, the answer was 10000 times yes)

And let the scale, the metrics, and the paces sort themselves out.

And… I have written… and rewritten… and rewritten this post.  For some reason, this one is difficult.  I put on time goals, and removed time goals.  I talked a lot about process, then deleted it.  I tried to justify why I will go garminless, then decided to wear it, and now I’m not sure.

However, at the end of the day, while I have tapered for this race, and more importantly, I’ll be giving myself a light week next week to recover so I can really break myself out there if I want, I’m going to do the same thing I’ve done all year.

1. Show up.

2. See what happens.

That’s all you can really do, right?

I started this post with all the nerd numbers for March.  I got a few lines into it and just didn’t wanna.  I just do not have the level of attention right now to dedicate to stats and graphs and such.  I’m sure part of it was that I didn’t do well, but that usually makes me want to quantify and figure out what happened, and fix it.  Right now, I am just in survival mode.  Long month has been long.  I can’t even.  Kinda like my poor cat there… (believe it or not, she wasn’t terribly unhappy about that)

This past weekend, we had a “people-cation”.  Since Sunday was Easter we spent some time with my fam, but on Friday and Saturday we had no plans besides training (though everyone and their mother TRIED to get us out).  We pretty much slept.  Sometimes 10+ hours per night, and a nap or two in there.  Hi there, exhaustion.  Nice to see you again (not really).  I feel more rested, but plunging directly back into stress at work doesn’t make me feel much better.  I still feel cranky, stabby, and about one step away from crawling under my desk and rocking back and forth when someone comes into my office with bad news.

Sadly, I still feel like I need about 4 more of these types of weekends before I’m recovered.  I have been wavering back and forth whether I need the day off after Texasman, and I just decided today that YEAH, yeah I do.  There is no way I could hang today that exhausted, and I don’t want to inflict that on my coworkers.

I’m hoping that things settle a little bit later in the week, but it’s been up to 11 since I returned from vacation in March, and I’ll be lucky if it goes back below 7-8 for quite a while.

So, I haven’t tracked my food for the last 5 days.  I may or may not start tracking again until after the race.  I kind of don’t give a fuck right now.

I haven’t made April goals or updated about my March ones.  I probably didn’t get very far because I don’t remember what they were.  I kind of don’t give a fuck about them.

I was going to give up beer for a month in lieu of smaller amounts of liqueur or wine (I’m not going THAT far) to try to reduce calories a bit.  Then my favorite seasonal beer came out.  The beer-bargo might have to wait until after season ends because there’s nothing like a cold beer after 4 hours of training at the lake or a hard race and I kind of don’t give a fuck.

There are plenty of things I should probably be doing around the house.  I kind of don’t give a fuck because I’m full up.

I have room for a few things in my life right now:

1. Work.  And it’s even encroaching on the amount of mindshare it should have.  I keep having dreams about being at my co-workers in weird situations, like summer camp.  But, it pays the bills, so I can’t be mad at it.

2. Training.  I’ve been maintaining a decent 8-10 hours per week, which includes 20-25 miles of running, and a decent amount of biking and swimming, and weights sometimes.  Oddly enough this consistency has netted some pretty solid race results and I feel pretty prepared to rock my first A race of the year, Texasman x-50.

3. Sleep and rest.  I can’t sacrifice this.  Doing that makes me even more cranky.

4. Small amounts of socialization and fun.  I did finally finish what I needed to run my story (and have probably said NEVER AGAIN because it took WAYYYY too much effort, or maybe just keeping it simple instead of trying to make the BESTEST STORY EVER).  I plan to hang out with friends for a bit next weekend instead of being a shut in.  But it has to be small, measured doses that doesn’t interfere with numbers 1, 2, or 3.

5. Eat good food.  Try to eat not so much bad food.  Even if I have to succumb to the takeout monster because there is like less than zero time to cook, try to stay away from the trifecta of evil – fried, simple carbs, and sweets, and pick places that I know I can get some good, solid fuel.  I also have to remember it doesn’t have to be gourmet.  Above, I opened up some beans, and added some salsa, guac, olives, onions, cilantro, cheese, lettuce, and put it in whole wheat tortillas.  Perfect meal to fuel a 90 min bike ride later, and took me five minutes.

That’s it.  No feeling shitty because I didn’t organize my vanity, no feeling guilty because there’s something awesome out there I’m not doing, no feeling like a jerk because I ate food I didn’t cook 5 times last week.  I can’t even deal with that right now, I can’t even.  I am in survival mode to get through the next two weeks without sobbing under my desk, murdering people, and getting through all this with my sanity in tact.  I let go of all these things, all these extraneous things, which means you’ll probably not see much here for a week or two unless I get inspired to ramble.

To end this post on a happy note, I’d like to call out some of the good training things I did last week:

• I rode outside once.  I fell twice, which is not awesome, but at least I’m getting it out of my system early in the year.  I also rode pretty steady at 16.8 mph in traffic, and could have ridden faster if the cars would just bugger off already.  We also did not shy away from the hills, so that was hills and wind and all of it.  This is my biggest question mark for the race, but that was a good sign going into it.
• I swam outside twice.  I felt crappy at the beginning of both getting used to the cold water (68 degrees – I don’t even understand how y’all can get down in those cold lakes), but at the end of my mile I felt pretty awesome and 38 mins is not bad at all for a training swim of 1 mile not really pushing it.  I will just know I need a decently long warmup swim – or at the very least to get my face wet for a while so I don’t flip out.
• I ran 21.25 miles even though I had a Sunday race which I pushed really hard and PR’d.  Six of those miles were off the bike Saturday in the heat, and they were at 10:30s and I had at least two more gears.  Good show.
• I’m not sure exactly where weights went, but we’ll pick those back up after May 4th.

Just like I’ll pick a lot of stuff up again after Texasman concludes, I drink a beer or 4, and get a damn rest week under my belt.

Question of the week: What is extraneous to you right now?  Can you let it go and not worry about it for the next week or two?