"It will settle"

[Day 13]

Title quote is from Chrissie Wellington, retrieved from a magazine I was reading over breakfast this morning. Pretty much sums up how things felt during the workout today so I thought it was fitting.

Today's Workout: AM treadmill run (one big long continuous hill) + core
Summary:

• Run:
• WU: 1.5 mi @ 6.0-6.2, 2% 
• Main Set: all at 6.2 mph, 1.0 mi @ 3%, 0.75 mi @ 4%, 0.50 mi @ 5%, 0.20 @ 6%
• WD: 1.0 mi @ 6.0, 2%
• Treadmill summary: 5.07 mi, 50:05
• Garmin summary: 5.24 mi, 49:56, 9:32 pace
• Post-run core: 
• 50-30-20 shoulder touch planks
• 30-30 leg lifts
• 10-10 PT lying leg extensions (R/L)
• Plank series: 1:30/0:45/0:45/1:30 w/ 30 SR b/w
• 10 four count sit ups

Hit Rate: 13/13 (100%)

Notes/thoughts:

• It will settle: every time I upped the incline today I had a moment where my brain was just like, ugh I have to do how much more of this? And then we're gonna bring it up again? But the beauty of endurance work is that you always settle into it, you just have to give it time. I really felt that today. It's a good mantra to keep in mind when things feel off kilter early on in any workout/interval/whatever it may be. 
• Definitely still overreaching every time I plan a workout. I was like, oh I've never really done hill work on a treadmill before (other than that one dabble into a preprogrammed hill run on the treadmill the one random day) so let's try something new today. Let's not do actual intervals because I don't want to be too aggressive. And I found this cool thing that was like a continuous hill pyramid and thought, yay perfect for the base weeks! Except I'm totally not a good enough runner to do this as a pyramid yet. xD Sooooo instead I took it as a ladder. Worked my way up today. Will hopefully be able to work my way down too next time? And then we can work on inching up that pace? We'll see. I've got things to work towards.
• I really need someone cracking the whip on the core work. I did some amount of it but honestly I didn't put in that much effort. Really lack discipline with the core stuff, especially when it comes to planking. It's one of those things where I need someone else to be holding the stopwatch and pestering me about form otherwise it just doesn't get done right. (Notice that I went for a 1:30 based set instead of the typical 2:00 based set...yeah...) It sucks that this is actually important to me being better at the other stuff because I dislike core work so much. I am trying and I guess not doing as much as I should be is still better than doing nothing...but I still really just need someone to glare at me and tell me to actually do the work when it comes to this. (Henry? Sunday after we get back from Killington? Just make me do it?)
• Henry had to do some work to kick my sorry butt out of bed this morning. I really just wanted to sleep in. But he made me get up and got me to the gym where I subsequently got to do my thing so that was nice. 
• My right knee was bothering me a bit today again during the run, and it's been intermittently painful throughout the morning, so that's something to watch out for. Especially seeing as I'm skiing over the weekend, the knee health will be pretty pivotal to everything.
• Did Garmin update their software? Because my accelerometer numbers this week have looked really different than they used to look and nothing has really changed about the treadmills or my running I don't think...we'll see if the change trends continue. I reserve judgment until a later time. 
• Cadence was still low on average today (169 spm). I had some good stretches in the middle of higher cadence running though, so that's a step in the right direction. Probably taking a run outside tomorrow so hopefully those numbers will give me a better indication of what the deal with cadence is right now. 

In other news, I took some time for myself this morning. Just like didn't do anything I was supposed to do, took a bath, watched some random videos (including this which got me real pumped about skiing over the long weekend), laid around in bed, it was fantastic. I haven't done much of that the past week and a half, low pressure me time was much needed. Some days I don't take well to needing down time and like spend the entire time fretting and being a little crazy. Today though, I felt like I deserved it and it was time well spent so I'm not living with as much angst as I usually am after blowing off responsibilities for an entire morning. Now I have to actually go address the realities of my life though lol. At least I'm already done with all the training I have to do today? And it was a short workout at that?

Two sessions on the books for tomorrow: a morning swim and an afternoon run (hopefully outdoors). Fingers crossed for warmer weather and NO WIND (because I have to bike out/back in the morning). Okay gonna go get my undercut trimmed up now. (:

Much love,

Jess

Today, I was kind to myself

I'm not often kind to myself when it comes to training. I guess that's really not the point of training. Sometimes I have days like today when I think that maybe I should change that. Exercise is supposed to be a kindness to your body and a kindness to your mind and a kindness to your soul and it's so easy for someone like me to push all of that aside in pursuit of faster. But today, I was kind to myself, and I'm proud of that.

I had an interval set planned, a repeat of my October 1st treadmill interval workout at a slightly faster pace, and it was one of those days where I felt like from the very outset it wasn't going to go very well. I thought maybe it was just a matter of being slow to warm up though, so I gave myself a nice long warm up before launching into it and things really didn't feel much better. There are a lot of excuses I could make (and will talk about later in this post) for why I then decided to just axe the set and go home, but in reality all it was was that I didn't feel well. I had woken up feeling well, way better than what I was expecting given the combination of the load on my body and the work at school and the hours of sleep I've been getting (which have been acceptable, but not perfect), and I didn't want to give that up today. I wanted to feel good, and I listened to myself, and I was kind to myself, and I am allowing myself to feel good.

Now here come all the things that could be construed (if by no one else, then at least by myself) as excuses, but I want to remind myself that they're also perfectly valid reasons to make a decision. Not every decision to not stubbornly charge ahead at full speed at all times is the wrong decision. It's like Henry said, if life were a race, you would have to pace yourself to get the most out of it.

I could have probably gritted my teeth and gotten through the workout I had planned or down-adjusted the pace, but honestly I don't know what my body would have been willing to take from that experience. It would have spent the rest of the day exhausted and likely not gotten enough sleep tonight before I hit the pool for a workout early tomorrow morning. My body would be beat up and unhappy and I would be beat up and unhappy and the marginal physical gain I was going to get from that workout really didn't seem like it was going to be worth those consequences.

Also, there is the obvious and real issue of the fact that I was tired running today, which meant my form was sloppy. That can get dangerous on a treadmill, and even when I tried really hard to focus on correcting my form, my exhausted brain really couldn't keep up with both the physical effort and the mental effort. So in the end I just called it quits, took it as a short "easier" day, and will focus on trying to make tomorrow better.

Today's Workout: AM treadmill run
Summary:

• All at 2% grade
• WU: 2400 m @ 6.0-6.5 mph
• Main Set: 400/200, 800/400, 400/200 @ 8.0/6.0 mph
• WD: 800 m easy @ 6.0 mph 
• Total (machine): 3.55 mi, 32:41
• Total (Garmin): 3.33 mi, 32:40, 9:48 pace

Hit Rate: 8/9 (88.8%)

Notice that I still let it count towards my hit rate. I'm reminding my future self that it is acceptable to be kind to myself. Also, a shortened workout is different from a missed workout and if nothing else, I'm still moving in the right direction. Not every day has to be a destructively hard and impressive day. Some days are just average. Some days are less than average. But I got out there and followed the advice that every recreational athlete has been given: Do the first 20 minutes. If you're still not feeling it, you can be let off the hook. And usually in that time period, you get into it and you can finish the workout. But some days, it just isn't meant to be. On those days, it's worth accepting that you tried and that it's better to come back and try again tomorrow. I will try again tomorrow. (:

Much love,

Jess

Accepting your limits

There are a couple of big factors that I think have really shaped my mentality and the way I approach life nowadays. I grew up with Asian parents who were big on telling me exactly where I stood both in terms of my abilities/talents/limitations and in terms of my work ethic. I was smart and not very hard-working when it came to school, I had a moderate amount of musical ability but again no work ethic when it came to piano, I had no talent and an average amount of work ethic when it came to dance, I had a tiny bit of talent and a lot of work ethic when it came to swimming. Unlike a lot of parents, my parents weren't really "process" parents. They didn't see it as my job to try my best on everything. I think they knew that if I were to throw myself at everything 100%, I would burn out super quickly because I have the capacity to invest myself in things too fully. At the same time, they also made it very clear that in the arenas of life where I was capable and fell short because I didn't work hard enough, that was on me. I think the message at the end of the day was always to set goals and know exactly where I want to be and balance the talent/work division in such a way that I got there without wrecking myself.

The other big factor is that I grew up as an endurance athlete. I lived within the confines of a sport that rewards the kind of work ethic that doesn't stop for anything. It's hard to be successful as a swimmer. You put in a lot of hours, your easy days are few and far between because the sport is so low impact, you're sore pretty much all the time because the sport is year-round and even with periodization, you don't really get many real breaks from the grind. A few big things that I took away from those years are that (a) accomplishing what you want to accomplish can be really difficult and (b) you are deeper than you think (as is everyone else, so if you want to keep up, you'd better be working).

I think all of this has put me in a place where I honestly believe that when my dreams are big (by my standards) and are the kinds of dreams that require a lot on the work end to make up for a lack of talent on the talent end, I feel like I always have to be working at the edge of what I'm capable of. And the biggest problem I have with that right now is that I can't define that edge very clearly, and even when I can, I don't necessarily want to acknowledge it. One of the things you learn from going to practice day in and day out is that your brain always wants you to quit before your body really will, so it doesn't matter how much it hurts or how hard it is, you just have to suck it up and keep pushing. It's never been okay to just stop and rest, because even though that might make things easier or the rest of your workout faster, it's going to stall your progress in the long run.

But then real life steps in, and strangely enough my earliest interactions with physical exhaustion have all come in the form of swim practice. So when I'm exhausted in real life and I have a list of things I should be doing but I just want to take a break and recharge a bit, I'm really uncomfortable with the idea of letting myself do that because it's like quitting in the middle of a set. Physical exhaustion always feels like something I should just be able to push through and when I can't do it, it makes me feel like I've really failed.

Why am I here writing this thing? Yesterday was a tough day. It ended really rough for me and I ended up just staying up really late crying over how exhausted I was and how I really couldn't face this day up ahead because there was so much to do (including an early morning workout). Logically, all that says is that I should take the day off and cut myself some slack for not being perfect while taking recovery more seriously than I am right now, but in my heart it just feels like I've failed. It feels like I stopped pushing and let go in the middle of a set I should have fought through.

Regardless, I guess the point is this: I slept in this morning. I will not be working out today. I'm pushing the gym session back to tomorrow and making a few adjustments to the rest of the week. I didn't have a rest day planned this week so it really doesn't hurt to take one (so no hit against the hit rate), especially since I haven't actually taken a full day off since the half and this will probably be good for me in the grand scheme of things. I thought these thoughts were worth the update. I'm sure I'll come back to them at some point in the future and they'll ring true for another day later in the cycle. Wish me luck with the rest of the day. I'm going to try to be the best that I can be, even if I didn't get off on as good of a start as I had wanted.

Much love,
Jess