Written by This was the first week in some time where I have had a day off from training. Right now, I train 7 days a week – and most of those days have two training sessions with the exception of one or two but they tend to have one longer session. For example, my Saturday rides are increasing in duration meaning that I typically don’t do a second training session on these days. We are intentionally increasing my ride durations during the week to avoid me having to do super long rides every Saturday. Of course, this week’s ride was 3 hours on Saturday which some may consider ‘super long’, but will very soon start to feel like shorter rides.
As I write this, I have 147 days until the ride. When I think about this and the training yet to come between now and then, it seems daunting. My best days are those that have me up early and completing at least one training session by the time my husband wakes up so that I only have one left in the day during the time he’s awake. There’s something psychological about that for me that helps to make me feel that training for this ride isn’t my life, but a part of my life. The earlier I wake up and finish, the earlier I start the rest of my day which includes walking the dog, anything around the house that needs doing, and – very importantly – the work I am doing with my husband and his company right now. I’m enjoying the work I’m doing with him greatly but it does require large chunks of time to focus on the initiatives we have underway. The better I can plan out my day, the easier it is for me to be as productive as possible in all areas of my life.
On this note, admittedly, I was almost today years old when I learned that Training Peaks has a subscription link that can be added to your calendar so that your workouts can appear on your calendar applications of choice. This was a big win for me as I managed to regain the time I had been taking every Sunday each week to add each workout to my calendar manually. That exercise did, however, provide me with some muscle memory around what to expect in the coming week. Given that these items show up without the relative time of day you’d be completing each session, I’ll still have to manage that aspect into my schedule which should help me get some of that muscle memory back – but without the time it takes to simply add the sessions. This coming week (this next Sunday) will be the first time I’ll try it in earnest.
Overall, I enjoyed my day of rest on Sunday – which was fortuitous as I wasn’t feeling well. I had been up early on Saturday for my long ride and we traveled to Columbus, Ohio on Saturday afternoon for an event we were attending. Something felt off starting in the afternoon. I felt flushed and overly tired. I tried to sleep on the flights to Columbus, but to no avail. We arrived fairly late in the evening and I enjoyed not having anything to do in the morning to take advantage of the time to rest. By Sunday evening, I was feeling better – though still tired. I think it was a mild cold or something coming on, and likely some dehydration from my long ride on Saturday coupled with the dehydration that comes with flying.
Of course, the reason I didn’t have a workout on Sunday was because I had 3 workouts on Friday. I swam, lifted, and ran. None of these was particularly taxing, but I did mostly just cruise in the water assisted by my fins, board, and paddles and buoys. I do this reminding myself that I’m not training for a swim – but a bike ride.
Overall, an uneventful week. The runs are increasing in duration and I’m finding myself pleasantly surprised with what I’m able to do in terms of both pace and distance. In my head, I’m still recovering from my ACL surgery in spite of my surgeon telling me my leg is healed at the molecular level. Even with that reassurance, I still have difficulty ‘trusting’ my leg and feeling like I’m not going to injure it somehow. I did, after all, injure it in the first place.
Physically, I’m feeling great. It’s the mental challenges and the time challenges that I expect will start to plague me somewhat as the time I’m spending training increases. I’ll need to become even more careful about my precious time and how I’m spending it outside of my training. This isn’t a bad exercise, but will likely see me adding more blocks of work time to my calendar and managing my calendar ever so carefully and closely.