How Many Friends Does it Take to Train for an Ironman?
Monday, June 11, 2007
I have some very smart -- and very good -- friends. This is an email I got from one of them over the weekend:
Hey Erin. I just read your blog entry about riding the bike for 7 hours and then deciding to do a triathlon the next morning, and your discouraging moment with your masters coach that you greeted with a long, hard swim instead of the planned shorter and easier one...and it made me think of my friend John.
John was on my track team in college. He ran the 10k, and he was great at it. He used to run 150 miles a week, and he would run every training run as hard as he could. And when he raced he would just eat other people up. I always thought he ran so hard during training runs (contrary to our coach's instructions) because he needed it psychologically, rather than physically. (A more sensible plan was the one outlined by our coach, that had hard days followed by easier days, giving your body some time to recover, and longer runs followed by shorter ones.) John always ran long and he always ran hard. He needed to walk into that next race feeling like no one had trained as hard as he had and that no one could run as hard as he did, that no one had run through more pain than he had and that no one would be able to do so in the race either.When he was healthy, it worked. I remember once he decided to jump into a 10k race at a track meet where he hadn't planned to race. He didn't have his running shoes or his uniform. Instead, he ran in some black, clunky tennis-ish shoes and my race singlet (which was too big for him and, given that I had already run my own races, kinda smelly). Of course, he won the race. It was ridiculous. It was inspiring.
The problem was that when he got injured, boy did he get injured. His body would break down. He'd miss weeks at a time. My senior year he got chronic fatigue syndrome, and couldn't run at all.
So I guess the point of this little story that has come tumbling out of my head is that, as I'm sure you know, correctly trained is best, but undertained is better than overtrained, and sometimes your head thinks your body needs more training than your body actually needs. And when you're training for a big event, you are much more likely to think you are undertaining when in fact you are overtraining, because you're anxious and you want to do well and every fiber in you says that to do well you need to do some more training!
I've never done a triathlon and I'm certainly not the right person to talk about how one should train for it. But it seems to me that you are in good shape and that you have trained awfully hard and that there is still a fair amount of time left to go before race day. So, maybe a little rest now and then. And maybe a 20 min swim followed by some unexpected fun, rather than another punishing 80 minutes of desultory laps, since there is more than enough time left for that.
Yesterday was an absolutely perfect day. I had an invite to go pontooning, to brunch, and to play cards at the Union Terrace. I was tired, and a little sore from my Saturday workout. And so, I decided to forgo my 30 minute easy bike and 20 minute swim, and just relax. I felt better about that decision than tacking the extra 60 minutes on to my swim workout last week.
So, duly noted, my friend, and thank you.
A thank you, also, to Darin and Mindy. They found me on my Saturday ride, prepared with a Gatorade refill and a detailed atlas. They helped me figure out where I was (again, stupid unmarked roads), Darin gave me a heads-up about another confusing section yet to come that always got him turned around when he was training for this thing, and sent me on my way with their cell phone numbers in case I needed remote atlas help.
And another to Chief of Stuff, who rode the last 20 miles of my bike route with me on Saturday, on a mountain bike. 'Nuff said.
This is clearly the most team-like non-team sport around, and I couldn't do what I'm doing without all those around me.
Posted by Erin 7:41 AM