Can’t believe it has been over a month since I last posted. As you can see I wasn’t kidding when I said Nov/Dec are super busy around these parts. Luckily I managed to keep everything under control. Household, training, work, moving into a new office. All with just one minor meltdown, related to “that time of the month”. Fortunately I am able to recognize my too predictable mood swings and can manage them without them wreaking too much havoc; but they are still not pleasant.
Training has been going along great. My consistency is at its peak, and I plan on keeping it that way as my hours start to increase. I can start to feel my fitness coming back and it is not even the end of December yet! I finally joined Masters swim and it has been great. I am pushing myself harder than I have ever pushed myself in the pool, and seeing paces and intervals that I thought would not be possible at this time. My swimming is still a work in progress, but this week at masters I was completing 100′s at a pace faster than my fastest threshold pace before Brody was born! I might not be what some people consider fast, but I was fast on MY terms, and that is progress.
The one area I have been struggling the most is running, not because my body can’t, but because my head gets in the way… way too much. A couple of weeks ago I had the run test on the schedule. I headed to the track and did the warm up. The whole time thinking how much the test was going to hurt and how afraid I was of blowing it. Even though I tried to convince myself that “it is what it is”; “it is just a test”; “this is just baseline”; I could not get over the fact that I would be slow. A part of me was still holding tight onto what I was before, not the reality of the now. Needless to say, I did not finish the test. I started it 5 or 6 times; and each time I quit. I finally threw the towel and drove myself home. I cried. I decided I would attempt the test the next morning. I was SO messed up about it, that I could not sleep! I wrote to coach at 2 am, told myself that I was in no shape to perform the test the next morning and finally was able to catch some zzz’s.
Coach’s email back to me was just one phrase… And that was just enough to get my butt into gear. I set myself to complete the run test the following saturday, but on the Friday before I took advantage of my work from home day, and spontaneously decided to do the test that day. I cut the warm up a bit shorter and did the test. I still wanted to stop, but I pushed through. It did hurt, but I finished; and the result was not as bad as I thought it was going to be. Just 23 seconds per mile slower than my fastest. You should have seen me, I threw my hands up in the air as if I was finishing some race and winning.
And in a way, I did win. I won the battle against the voices in my head that told me I couldn’t; and I proved them wrong. I am going to save this little win in my back pocket, and pull it out when the going gets rough. It’s the small victories that count the most. And I got this.
