This is kind of a three part posting. First things first. I actually slept straight through last weekend’s time trial. Which is amazing because I never oversleep. Never. Except for last Saturday so I guess I can no longer say never. I can’t take too much credit for this. I have three cats. Three very food-motivated cats. (I also have a dog. I wanted to throw that out there so that no one thinks that I’m just the crazy cat lady.) Every morning the cats wake me up to feed them. They are usually pretty good about waiting until the alarm goes off, although some days they start a few minutes before the alarm goes off. If I don’t get out of bed as soon as the alarm goes off, they start ‘eating’ me - probably as a warning about what will happen if I don’t get out of bed and feed them. Small kitty-cat nips on my nose, fingers, whatever they can reach are very effective at getting me out of bed. Once they are fed, I can go back to sleep if I want but usually I stay up and get my day started and, if I have somewhere to be, I definitely stay awake. Unfortunately, that didn’t happen last Saturday. My guess, they were probably just as tired as I was.
I had some really bad news earlier this summer and hadn’t been sleeping much at all over the last month. Finally, last week Monday, I had a full night’s sleep - eight entire hours without waking up. I felt so much better - and then my air conditioning broke. Even with the windows open all night and fans blowing, the house was in the 90s for much of the week and sleeping was really difficult. The air conditioning repair company couldn’t come until Friday morning so Friday was the first night that the house was cool enough to sleep well. Knowing how tired I was and that I had to leave the house by 7:30 to get to my race on time, I got everything ready on Friday night and went to bed at 10 with my alarm set for 6:00, a fairly normal time for me. And I woke up, surrounded by sleeping kitties, at 10:17 - way too late to get to my race. Obviously, the kitties were just as overtired from not sleeping as I was!
Now for the readjusting part. Due to the bad news, I had to pull out of two races that I planned for this season: the Lums Pond Duathlon two weekends ago and the Short Course Duathlon World Championships next weekend. Having to drop out of my goal race for the year combined with a lot of sadness and a lot of stress has really done a number on my motivation. Reading blog postings by the rest of the team has been really helpful and has gotten me out the door on several days when I’d rather have been curled up on the coach. And I do still have three upcoming races that I’m registered for and should be able to make: the HalfFull Triathlon, the Army 10-Miler, and the Richmond Marathon. But I’ve realized that I’m not going to have the level of performance that I wanted to have. So I’ve been readjusting my training. My mileage and endurance is far lower than it should be at this point but I’ve decided that I’m just going to accept it as it is, increase it gradually, not worry too much about the speed work I should have been doing, and do my best at what I can do. I’ve also realized that Compex is going to be essential to my succeeding with my adjusted plan. While I’m not going to stress myself about where I am compared to where I should be, I do realize that consistent training going forward is going to be essential to achieving my revised goals and Compex is going to be essential to my consistency.
Finally, this week has been far too busy and I haven’t had as much time as usual to sit at my desk and work. Lately, I’ve been done with each week’s work by Friday. This week, I’m going to need to work all weekend. But the real downside is that I only was able to fit in Compex sessions on two days. And boy did I feel that! I was really sore the last two days, including a weird back pain while I ran, and couldn’t figure out what I had done. Then I realized it wasn’t what I had done. It was what I hadn’t done. Without my daily Compex Endurance and Active Recovery sessions, my muscles were feeling far more fatigued and it was impacting the quality not only of my workouts but also of just walking. I’m going to try really hard not to make that mistake again!
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