Attitude check

[Day 69B]

There's been a trend these past couple of days. It always gets like this, I always get to a place with training where I find myself really wrestling with what I'm doing and what it means and how I can go about doing these things that I love without completely mangling my love for them. It always happens and I've still not figured out how to fix it. But I always have thoughts, so I will share those. Workout summary first.

Today's Workout: Trainer ride, 120 mins, grab bag of things
Summary:

• WU: 
• 10 mins easy 
• 8 x :30/:30 spin ups 
• 2 mins easy 
• Main Set: 
• 5/5/5 @ 80-85/85-90/90-95 rpm 
• 2 mins recovery 
• 5/5/5 @ 80-85/85-90/90-95 rpm 
• 4 mins recovery 
• 6 x (3 mins on, 2 mins recovery) at 90-95 rpm, starting at base, going up one gear each minute for the 3 minute working set
• 2 extra mins easy
• 4 x 2/2/2 as base +3 @ 65-70 rpm, base +4 @ 60-65 rpm, easy spin recovery at base
• WD: 8 mins easy
• Totals: 28.63 mi, 2:00:37, 14.2 mph average

Hit Rate: 73/81 (90.1%)

Notes/thoughts:

• I did not go very hard today. It was not a bad workout despite that. Hit both 5/5/5 rounds, they didn't feel fantastic towards the end and I will admit that there were some pace blips below target (but for the most part I was consistently on target) but compared to how that felt the first time I came back and tried to hit that set, it was way way way way better. It seems like the extra rest time did do my legs some good.
• Worth noting that I did drop out of target on the 3rd minute of a few of the 3 minute sets, but again, it was a real solid effort for the most part. I actually sort of botched the second round altogether and thought it was going to lead into one of those descending spirals of "omg I can't do this" failures, but I was good about mentally checking myself and getting back on track so I'm really happy about that. 
• The point is, I didn't kill myself on the trainer today, which is what I usually do, so it feels a little bit weird to have not been entirely destroyed by the endeavour. 

Non-workout related thoughts:

• I finally cleaned the clips on my bike shoes. They are doing much better now and are way less stiff when I'm trying to get in/out of my pedals.
• I listened to 2.5 podcasts today. Two from the archives of Julie Foucher's podcast and half of one of Spin's. There were some interesting recurrent themes today in the podcasts of people just really digging into focusing on what they thought was best for them and their happiness and tuning out the rest of the noise and just doing that. I need more of that in my life. I think I try to worry about every imaginable thing and the vast majority of the things I worry about are not important. If I just let myself do me, without worrying about the plan or the repercussions or whatever, I would be fine. I've never not been fine and I imagine the world will continue to turn even if I don't have every little variable under control. I need to take a chill pill is really what I think the universe was trying to tell me today. 
• I love longer warm downs. I don't always take warm downs that amount to a full 10 minutes or more, but I find that when I do, I'm always exhausted initially, and then I recover and my body naturally amps up the pace/effort towards the end. It finds this rhythm it wants to be in and it goes and gets it, even though it's warm down and honestly I couldn't care less about what I was actually doing. And today, it was interesting because while I was watching the rpms and speed go up towards the end of my warm down, it clicked that this was my body doing the thing that it loves to do. My body loves that feeling. There's like a zone that it really enjoys being in, sometimes it's high intensity, sometimes it's low, sometimes it's comfortably in the middle. But whatever it is, my body really loves moving and experimenting with movement and it's so nice when it just gets in its groove and does its own thing without my brain having to worry about it. That's the thing that makes me feel like I was made to do this. Maybe not fast or well, but I was made to move and it's so lovely. 
• Oh now I want to tell a story. Fun fact, I spent a lot of my sophomore year of college playing around with different ways to stay in shape. I had sort of just taken freshman year off from physical activity. I took the occasional swim and the occasional jog but honestly that was all I did. Then I fell back into club swimming and starting trying to run more and spent more time in the gym and I had all these questions for myself about what fitness was going to look like in my life when I got older, because I knew that I had to make good habits early if I didn't want to fall into really poor physical health like most of the nation does eventually. So I played around. I went to yoga classes and pilates classes and group fitness classes and spin classes. I found a yoga studio I loved and I went on Saturday or Sunday mornings just to clean my hands of the week and it was fantastic. I went to spin classes early in the morning on Mondays and Wednesdays because the intensity blew my mind and I loved being pushed like that. I went to swim practice and I lifted because I wanted to swim faster and I had some cool friends that went to the pool with me. I ran occasionally still because I had always been jealous of runners because what the heck is running and how is it that people are good at it. Anyways, it was my funny foray into trying anything and everything that actually made me feel like I could run a triathlon if I wanted, after all I was a swimmer, I'd been going to spin class, and I'd been sort of running sporadically. But I'd really had no life goals beyond trying to just do random stuff at that point. And somehow I got back on that path of competing with swimming, then with tris, and like got lost from that whole adventure of just doing whatever I wanted to for no other reason than the fact that I wanted to (and it's good for you). I sort of miss that right now. And don't get me wrong, I love racing. I would do anything for racing (as evidenced by all of this going on right now) and as long as I have the ability to be racing I will probably continue racing. But I would love to find a way to be able to race and to return to my former "I just do stuff because I want to and it's awesome" mentality. That was a really long bullet point. Here let me make a new one.
• I don't know that I ever will be able to race and just have fun doing whatever I want though. So much gets invested into racing (in terms of money, my time, Henry's time and sanity and endless loving care/support) and it makes me feel like I have to work hard enough and do well enough to at least justify what's going on there. I think I'd feel really bad if these resources got funneled into giving me the opportunity to race and I didn't take it seriously and just waved my arms about and had a random fun time instead of focusing on what actually needs to get done for me to get better and do well. I dunno. Sometimes I think the pressure is unfounded. Sometimes I don't. Sometimes I wish there was no good reason for me to feel that pressure but honestly I think there is. So it makes me feel a little stuck when I daydream about being a cute sophomore on a try everything streak. I want to race more than I want that life back and I guess that means that things just can't be as much fun when I'm training for a race. It's sort of a bummer. I'm still working out what that means long term. I'm still trying to figure out if I can make some kind of middle ground. I'm sure time will give me the answer, but until then, I'll just keep speculating.

Officially have a morning swim on the calendar tomorrow morning, but the weather is also predicting rain and honestly I'm not riding out/back from practice in the rain, so if that turns out to the be the case I'll just hit the gym extra early, no big deal. Only one workout for tomorrow, so should be a pretty good day. Happy hump day everyone!

Much love,

Jess