Riding the wave

Yesterday, I confronted this:

I almost did have a little brick wall cry with frustration. I did grunt some unattractive sounds as I battled with the wind trainer and with a body that wasn't doing what it was told, with muscles that just didn't want to give me any love and with my own fragile emotional state.

Bottom line, I had a bad session. In hindsight, there was some reasonable explanations for this. And I know this is common and we all have these experiences. At the time, however, I looked like this (subscript "oh my god I'm so crap, that was so shit, I am a failure):

and of course I tried to constrain the flood of adrenaline fuelled negative thoughts that irrationally pumped through my mind (i'm-terrible-that-was-terrible-i'm-not-improving-fast-enough-how-am-I-ever-going-to-be-competitive-oh-my-god-what-if-i-fail-at-this..........)

Etc. Really productive and helpful.

With the benefit of food and 8 hours sleep, a new day has dawned and a new training session to tackle. Which, I'm pleased to report, has been nailed perfectly. Which goes to show - we all have off days, but the important thing is to leave the off day in the off day. Don't drag it or the negative thoughts associated with it through to other training sessions so that the off day turns into off days or an off week.

When I have days like this, I often search for things to remind myself why I am doing what I am doing, to show how far I have come and to basically keep myself and my thoughts in perspective. Today, I thought I'd go back and see how many training hours I've logged since starting my half-IM training program 8 weeks ago (can't believe it's only been 8 weeks!)

So - over the past 8 weeks, my training has looked like this:

• 80% of the time has been on the bike, 15% has been running and 5% swimming
• I've biked 1,191km, I've run 226km and swum ~ 70km
• The highest 2 training weeks out of 8 were over my Christmas holidays (so.....what holiday? :) lucky I love it!)

Not a bad effort for an 8 week base build! 

Needless to say, my internal hysteria over the one off session was mitigated significantly by looking (a little proudly I have to say) over my efforts over the past 8 weeks. Lots of hours, a fair bit of sacrifices, a lot of hard work and pushing your body just that "little bit more" when needed......but I think we're getting there :) and I know the hard stuff is yet to come. Exciting!