In my last post, I mentioned that I was enjoying my off-season and enjoying the fact that I was DONE with racing for the year. Well, it would appear that my "off-season" was pretty short-lived, and I've taken the plunge into base training! It would also appear that I am not completely DONE with racing for the year-triathlons yes, but I'll be doing some running and swimming races to keep sharp, and just for the fun of it over the next couple of months. Then I'll take a break over the Christmas holidays. The reasoning behind me getting back into base training already can be attributed to 1) the fact that I CAN actually train right now, because I'm injury-free, as opposed to last year, when I lost a ton of training time between Sept-Dec after my bike accident, 2) the fact that stamina and endurance are weaknesses of mine, and that this is an excellent time to try and build volume slowly, and 3) the fact that I get really antsy and don't know what to do with myself if I'm not able to swim, bike, or run, (my career as a future yoga guru was looking bleak).
When I just stop for a moment and look back to where I was sitting last year at this time, I have to smile and know that I'm at least 100x better off this year. For starters, I'm not wrapped in gauze waiting and wishing for my gaping wounds to fully close, my shoulder and scapula are situated where they are supposed to be, and I'm not living under the very ugly, dark cloud of the consequences of a totally unintentional event that would prevent me from being an active member of the athletic community. It makes me REALLY happy to know that I put my head down and pushed through all of those obstacles, in conjunction with so many other "life obstacles" throughout the year, to put together a solid race season and to be sitting here now with more motivation and confidence in myself to fulfill my potential as an athlete.
This post was supposed to be a brief one, so here are just a few things that I learned over the season & will change for next year:
-the training volume that a "typical" Pro triathlete can handle is NOT what my body can handle. My training program has been/will be tweaked accordingly, since I don't recover as quickly, and tend to get sick or injured at a "critical" volume that others can handle.
-traveling to and racing 3 times in a span of 4 weeks doesn't work for me, so I won't schedule races like that for next year
-taking a week easy/off at the end of July is necessary for me if I'm going to continue racing into October and beyond
Thanks for reading! Until next time...
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