What a week for Tea!
Training and racing, both, have their moments. Good & bad moments.
For the most part, my season was fantastic. Of course, I was happy. Thrilled would be more appropriate.
The hardest thing to deal with is when you don't hit a goal or you feel like you're not making any progress....or progress is so slow that it almost seems like just a good day as opposed to true fitness gains.
On the bike, I made tremendous gains with not much effort.
The swim has been frustrating to me. I pretty much stayed the same all season. Poor swim coach, she's so patient with me. In racing, I wasn't too terribly concerned with my swim. Depending on the race, I'd come out of the water in the top 5, with all of us exiting within a second of each other.
My frustration with swimming came from Master's. No matter how hard I tried, I couldn't hold the interval. By the time, we got to the end, I'd be off by 5 seconds or even more.
It would make me CRAZY! I was working so hard. 50-100-15-200-200-150-100-50. I wanted to give up.
Forget descending, I couldn't even MAINTAIN.
It's so draining to give and give and give and get nothing back.
Then the run. I knew a year ago that it would take me over a year to get close to my goals. At every race, I would get smarter and race better.
Still, I waited and waited and waited.
Isn't there a point when your body is supposed to catch up? These women that I race against are so fast. Why can't I be like that? When will it be my turn?
Stick to the plan. Don't go off it. As much as you want to run faster or longer, DON'T DO IT.
I kept running. Kept following the plan. There were days when I'd get up, and I think "This is not worth it." But, I'd get dressed and do what I was told.
When you know it's going to take at least a year, it's different than actually getting up day after day to a few seconds faster here or there. NOT a few seconds per mile faster, a few seconds over a DISTANCE.
It's been hard. It's made me appreciate the age groupers and pro's who go through this year after year, chasing the same thing I am.
In that way, we're really no different.
I didn't want to give up because then I'd just be back in the same place I'd always been....waaaaay in the back. Over one year, I'd managed to move from the back all the way up to 4th place.
I've been working with Coach for just over 10 months now. I admit that I sometimes look at my plan and I think the guy's just plain crazy.
Thinking it and saying it out loud are TWO completely different things.
This week was another week of Master's and pyramids and intervals and long intervals and UGH all that same stuff that MAKES ME WANT TO PULL OUT MY HAIR.
But I keep going.
We warm up, and Coach writes the workout on the board. My heart just sinks. It's the pyramid again.
I CAN'T DO IT. I CAN'T DO IT. I JUST CAN'T KEEP UP WITH THESE PEOPLE. These people swim at Nationals and all those bigswimeventsthaton'tmeananythingtomebutIknowthey'reimportant.
The craziest thing happened.
I COULD DO IT.
For no reason that I could think of, other than my body just finally caught up, I not only beat the intervals but I didn't fade and swam the last 50 faster than the first 50.
I beat my 200m time by 10 seconds. I beat my 100m time by 15 seconds.
BIG JUMPS. Not frustrating baby steps. BIG JUMPS.
When we got to our 10 x 50 kicks, coach had me make one itty bit adjustment, and I took off. Most powerful kicking I've done.
I think I was grinning from ear to ear when I got out of the pool.
Of course a breakthrough in the pool meant a very difficult run the next day. The day that I had mile repeats.
By mile 3, my legs started really getting sore.
I might not be the fastest runner, but you'll be hard pressed to fine one more determined. I kept running.
I stuck to the plan. No. There were no records blown away, but I did the workout.
The next day (today), I had a one hour LT bike + 2 mile run with a special little note from Coach that says: Run HARD! Let's see how it goes.
Dear, DEAR COACH
ARE YOU &@#&*$% CRAZY?
A 9:30 PACE? OFF THE BIKE?
Sure, I've run mile repeats ON A TRACK at 9:30.
But NOT the day AFTER mile repeats and CERTAINLY NOT immediately after a bike.
Once again, I did the workout.
And I ran, hard. I didn't know how hard I was running. I just set my garmin to beep when I hit a mile, and I was going to turnaround and run hard back.
At 2miles, I stopped. I finally looked at how fast I had run. 9:34 pace and a negative split to boot. The first mile was around 9:40 and the second was around 9:20 pace.
The one thing that I've been struggling with: negative splits.
Within 72 hours, I managed to do it without even knowing I was doing it. Without even trying to do it in two sports.
The nice thing about having a Coach that you don't see every day....I can roll my eyes and curse and complain and he'll never know about it....until I post it on my blog.
By then, I've already learned that he was right.
