It’s been almost a month since I last managed to write a post. A hectic, exhausting month where finding the time to sit and peacefully reflect on training and Ironman prep has been almost impossible. The usual mental run up to the Christmas Holidays that every teacher experiences every year had been, as with every other year, forgotten about. This was until I realised it was 9am on the last Sunday of the term, I was on my third coffee of the day and had already done over 6000 steps racing around school catching various students and members of staff who I needed to talk to before the end of the year. I’ve also been enrolled on an online training course which, whilst being incredibly useful, has been a huge drain on my time. Nevertheless, we are staying in Dubai for Christmas and I actually feel like this may be the year when the Christmas Spirit doesn’t kill my training!
At the time of writing, I am almost exactly six weeks away from my first big challenge of 2020; Ironman Dubai 70.3. As always with this tricky sport, I’m feeling varying degrees of confidence in each discipline.
My swim isn’t great at the moment, but rightly on wrongly this isn’t concerning me as much as maybe it should. With the swimming, I know that I can swim the distance at a relatively respectable pace. My run is getting there, in that I’m already extending my long runs to 15km with six weeks to go. Usually, I stick to 10km max and throw in a panicked 16km a couple of weeks out.
But, my bike. My bike, my bike, my bike. I’ve hit a complete wall with cycling. It’s as if I have convinced myself that I am utterly incapable of cycling at any decent pace for any sustained period of time. Last weekend, I had planned to go out with a friend for 100km. This was to be a nice, steady 100km ride, averaging around 25kph. No bother. Supposedly. At 30km in, I was talking myself in to going home as I had been feeling under the weather the day before. I spent twenty minutes battling with myself until I finally got a grip and carried on, settling in to a comfortable pace and ending up fully enjoying the remaining 70km.
The same happened this weekend. I got back in the gym the week before Christmas, the result of which was agonising muscular ache in my legs as I set off with a friend for a steady Zone 2 85km ride on a Thursday morning. As I got out of the car I made sure to make my friend aware that my legs were aching therefore I would be slow. And lo and behold, 20km in, I had decided I was going home. Fortunately, this friend is familiar with my mental breakdowns with regard to my cycling and managed to talk me out of quitting. She knew full well that if I went home I would end up kicking myself later in the day. So, I settled in and finished the ride. Admittedly, I was destroyed by the end (my legs really were in pieces), but the point was that I had, for the second week running, gone past my mental block and completed the ride.
So, this Christmas, my spirit really needs to be aimed at my cycling. On making sure I pack in the long rides, the hill rides, the interval sessions and the brick sets. I have six weeks to go until my first test, and those six weeks really need to be focusing on my tendency to mentally sabotage my own races.
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