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

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