Training (somewhat) Continues

It's been a bittersweet weekend with my training. Did a 3 hour (46 mile) bike yesterday starting at 8:00 a.m. and from the onset I really wasn't feeling it. We were to spend most of the ride doing rolling hills through Jefferson Memorial Forest, and I didn't know the route so I had no idea what to expect. It was a hot morning to start, not to mention the humidity and not a cloud in the sky (meaning the sun beat down on us the entire ride). We got about 30-40 minutes into the ride and it was decided that we would do part of the Louisville Loop, taking us out to the West End of Louisville then back up to downtown before heading to our ending point at the park. This meant that the tail end of our bike would be almost completely flat which, not what I needed or expected, but what I voted for and succumbed to given my state of mind at that point.

I took enough nutrition, and drank on my water from time to time, but I guess I wasn't drinking enough (or maybe should have brought something other than water) because I felt drained by the end of our ride, and after drinking three huge glasses of lemonade with lunch after, I still didn't have to immediately go to the bathroom. I even opted out of the thirty minute transition run I was supposed to do after the bike because I was so hot and tired - I couldn't imagine walking through the park for an additional half-hour after that bike.

Today, I had to get a two hour run in, and since I didn't want to get up at 6:00 a.m. to try and beat the heat, I decided to put it off until this evening, so I headed out the door at 7:00 p.m. The sun was still coming down pretty hard, and I had a small, 12 oz. bottle of frozen water with me. I was only running around my neighborhood, so I knew that if worse came to worse I could always head back home and finish out the run on the treadmill. The treadmill, however, sounded much worse than an 80 degree outdoor run so I was going to try and get as much of it done on the pavement as possible.

I started out with a 3 minute run and 3 minute walk warm-up before headed into my 4:1 intervals. As I said, the sun was beating down and I started sweating early on, so I was surprised at how good I felt throughout the run. I even made sure to take routes that would lead me away from home so I wouldn't feel tempted to just hang it up and succumb to the treadmill. With 40 minutes left to go, I actually ended up passing by my place not once, but twice (the second time was 1:35 in) but I still managed to keep on and took yet another turn away from the house trying to get the full 2 hours in. Alas, by the time I passed by the house once again it was 1:50 and I decided that was good enough. I ended up with almost 9.5 miles, which I believe is my longest run since the Derby mini in April.

So... despite my less-than-stellar ride yesterday, I made up for it with a better-than-expected run today. I guess it just goes to show that you never know what kind of training day you're going to have until you just get out there and do it. Which brings me to my next issue: the training itself.

My coach hadn't put up the training schedule for me for this week by this afternoon, so I was a bit concerned considering I like to plan ahead at what to expect for the week. Long story short, I've been missing many of the week-day sessions and he says that he doesn't know where to go with my training plan since it usually builds off of what I've already been doing. Since what I've been doing isn't much (by IM training standards anyway), I guess he doesn't know what to put on the schedule. This makes sense and I admitted that I have been slacking. Not due to laziness, but mostly due to still feeling overwhelmed, dealing with lack-of-motivation at times, and just plain old scheduling conflicts. Regardless, I get where he's coming from, so I told him that I'd like to talk about an option where he just creates a generic plan for me to follow for the next 4 months, taking into account what I've done so far so that he doesn't have to change up the plan when I have weeks like this. His response was for us to meet up tomorrow and talk about it, so that's what we plan to do. I guess I'll get a better idea of things once we talk things over and figure out our options.

Despite this, as well as the issues I was having a few weeks ago where I wanted to "hang it up," and back out of the race all together, I really don't want to do that now. I really do want to finish, but I want to finish and remember it as a good, fun experience - not a dreadful, awful thing that I had to "survive." I know in order to do that that I have to get the proper training in. It's just hard. Sometimes I don't know what drives me to skip those workouts. I need to do some soul searching on this and figure it out, because it would kill me to DNF in this race.