[Day 49]
There's a long one coming. And it's pretty damn personal. Brace yourselves. Let me just get the boring half of the post out of the way:
Today's AM Workout: CSP Practice, sprint free day
Summary:
- WU: 400 swim, 250 swim (as written was 2 x 400 swim)
- Pre-set: 10 x 75 free @ 1:10, RB 6/4/2 (I did 6/4/3 because I can't breathe every 2...)
- Main Set:
- 4 x 50 free @ 1:00 build to a sprint, no breathing last 12.5
- 8 x 25 free breakouts @ :30
- 50 MAX
- 6 x 100 kick w/ fins @ 1:30, 25 fly on back/75 choice
- 3 x (4 x 50 free @ :55 ascend 1-4), 100 easy between rounds
- WD: 400 swim easy as 100 back/300 choice
- Total Distance: 3650 SCY
Hit Rate: 52/55 (94.5%)
Notes/thoughts:
- Kate is trying to get me to bike race. And ride with groups. Um both of those things make me uncomfortable but I guess I'm willing to try out either? (This thought is here because we talked about this on the car ride back, after she took me to a cafe to get delicious post-workout scones, mine was cheddar chive and it was so yummy.)
- There was a point where I was like, I just wanna go home. I'm so done with this. But Hap makes swims manageable, he always makes me laugh at some point and it brings me back to life a bit.
- My underwaters/breakouts are terrible. Ugh where did my pool swimming skills go.
This afternoon's workout was interesting...I guess. I'll tell my story first and put the details at the end so they make sense. I was planning a redo of that one continuous effort ride that literally broke my spirit a few weeks back. I had Henry to see me through that one (I've actually had Henry around to see me through a lot of the rougher rides recently) and so I sort of saw today as an opportunity to see how I'd fare on my own. It didn't go well.
I think right from the get go the entire concept of that workout freaked me out. It's hard to look at a set that long and say "I can get through this" when you're hurting 10 minutes into a 75 minute set. I don't get beat by distance. You can tell me that I have an hour left of something and as long as the only requirement on me is that I keep going, I will keep going. But when you add a pace requirement to that all of a sudden it totally breaks me. I'm not great with the whole intensity business. There was a time in my life when I was and I'm not really sure what happened or how I lost it, but I find myself in the position of knowing that I really struggle with maintaining intensity. And that's tough for me to face because I feel like you have to have that kind of mental resilience to be good at this and I want to be good at this and I don't know how to be tougher other than by just doing it. Which I haven't been doing.
Anyways, the gist of what happened was that in the 5 x 5/5/5 progression, I broke in the last 3 minutes of the first round. The first round. I got to three rounds at my target gearing last time and took the last two rounds a gear down which was already kind of disappointing but at least I did something vaguely resembling the workout. This time I got 12 minutes into the main set and I just couldn't. And it was incredible because I was so active about evaluating how I was feeling and yes it was a rough pace and yes my legs burned but it wasn't an outrageous level of effort. Logically speaking I knew that I should be fine but my brain was panicking the whole time and it just felt like I couldn't and I couldn't and so I didn't. It was so incredibly disappointing to just quit on myself like that. And I wanted really badly to just unclip and go shower and put it behind me but I couldn't, so I brought the gearing down one and thought, okay, let's go at this effort level. I know for a fact that I can do this a gear down. But same thing, 12 minutes in, I just couldn't. My brain just couldn't handle it.
It's weird, but I really do feel like the last time I did this it was just so hard and so incredibly painful that I really didn't gain any confidence from the workout. I remember just sort of being kept awake by it at night that day and the next few days and feeling like I could never do that again, I could never put myself through that again. No workout has ever really done that to me before, including like the terrors that were New Years Eve or New Years Day workouts from my age group swim club days. Usually getting through a tough workout gives you confidence but honestly that workout just broke me. And even now I really can't shake that feeling and I think that's a part of what's holding me back.
The other part is that accumulated fatigue is a thing. I can feel it every time I run and every time I ride, it takes me normally 30 or 40 minutes to get into it and feel okay instead of the usually 15 or 20. Even on the trainer, I tend to feel best a few repeats into whatever set I'm doing because it just takes forever to get my legs to loosen out. So in a way I know that had I just gotten a little bit further through it it would have probably eased up a bit. But I just couldn't, even after I dropped down a gear, and I ended up feeling so stuck and frustrated and disappointed with myself.
I ended up getting off the bike and taking a short run. I felt like I needed to run. The only time I ever ran in high school was when I was really upset. Sometimes I'd get into a fight with my parents or I would get really emotional over drama at school and I would just need to run. Need it like I needed air and nothing could stop me, I'd be out the door and I'd find myself x number of miles from home too tired to keep going and not really sure how I was gonna get back. The only time I ran during my first two years of college was after exams. I only ever ran when I had something to run from and today that feeling hit me full force while I was sitting on the bike. I just very literally had to run away from my problems.
The run did some good for me. I had a lot of negativity I needed to shrug off before I could really think about what was happening and getting outside and feeling like I could escape some of what was going on back in my apartment was good for me. And I had a long conversation with myself that basically went like this: So you're angry and frustrated and upset with yourself, what are you gonna do about it now? Quit? Never set foot on the trainer again? No. So what are you gonna do? Work harder. Well that's easy to say now seeing as you just ran away from the work you were supposed to be doing. That's not a good answer. Try again. Make a new plan. Okay what is this new plan. I don't know. Tell me why this isn't working for you. The set is daunting. I'm scared. How can we make it less daunting? It's sort of like goal setting. The end goal is always daunting, you have to break it up to make it manageable. Okay so how do we do that here? Well I obviously am not gonna hit the workout as written right now so why don't we make this set an ultimate end goal and work up to it. Great, more details. The number of repeats is scary. The fact that there's no rest is scary. Let's try and break the set up along those lines and work on building confidence with one of those things at a time before trying to put it together again as a big set. Okay that sounds good. Are you missing anything? Yes, I need more warm up time. I'm willing to sacrifice the sprinting at the end of this workout in order to make sure I hit this main set and can fit in solid warm up time. That all sounds good to me. Let's make it happen.
I was actually really amazed with where my brain took me on that run. That's not to say that I'm not still angry/upset/frustrated and that I'm not still sitting here berating myself for not just being tougher (I am, can't help it, it feels like I should be able to do this and the fact that I can't kills me), but I do know that at the end of the day, it doesn't matter if I can't get this set done for fitness reasons or for mental reasons, it all amounts to the same thing: I'm not doing quality work, I need a plan to fix that. So the plan is this. I'm going to do three variations of this workout in the next three weeks and on week four, I'm going to try to hit the main set (the 5 x 5/5/5, no finishing sprints) as the main portion of a 100 minute trainer ride brick (tack on 3-4 miles of running to the end of that). That starts tomorrow, where I'm going to do just 3 x 5/5/5 with 2 minutes of rest between each round and one set of six 45 second sprints. I just need to prove to myself that I can get through those last 5 minutes on each repeat and the reward of rest will hopefully keep me going past 12 minutes and we will build from there.
Is it sort of silly that I'm really hung up on this workout and am willing to build my entire trainer progression around it instead of working on other things? Yes. It's extremely silly. It makes very little sense in the grand scheme of training. But I also know myself and I know I need to get this monkey off my back if I want to continue enjoying what I'm doing. I can't let this beat me because so long as this hangs over my head, I'm going to feel like I don't have what it takes. I have to prove to myself that I can work through this, so I'm going to work through it, even if it comes at some sort of expense to whatever the ideal training plan is. And the crazy thing is, even at a very reasonable 3 x 5/5/5 with rest breaks, I'm still scared. It still scares me. But I'm gonna give it my best tomorrow and hopefully prove to myself that if I work at it, I will get there. Wish me luck. In the meantime, enjoy what happened today.
Today's PM Workout: An unexpected first brick of the year!
Summary:
- Trainer ride: 10.60 mi, 45:21, 14.0 mph average
- Outdoor run: 4.18 mi, 39:28, 9:27 pace
Hit Rate: 53/56 (94.6%)
I'm going to go shower now and continue to be disappointed with where today left me. It doesn't feel good to feel like I'm not moving in the right direction, but that's how these things go. It would be great if training and progress were linear but it never is. I did this a few weeks ago and today I couldn't do it, so now I have to look forwards and figure out how to get back to where I want to be. Gonna keep working for that breakthrough. Swim tomorrow morning, edited trainer ride re-do in the afternoon. Let's get it. (:
Much love,
Jess
