After my last post, you might have been wondering how I got to this place.
It's funny how timing goes, isn't it?
Toward the end of last week and over the weekend, two people* made several different comments to me that completely demoralized me.
These weren't comments like "You suck. You're so slow." Ha. No. That would have made me laugh.
These were comments that, after I had time to think about them, hit me that I really don't know if I want to continue with my training.
It doesn't matter if I misunderstood the comments. The damage had been done.
The more and more I thought about the comments, the angrier I got.
And, the more dispirited I became about everything and anything related to triathlon.
Yesterday, I spent the day venting to my girlfriends. I really needed to get everything out there. Sometimes you need to do that.
I thought they were both going to say "Tea. You were wrong", but they didn't. Instead, they listened to me (what they could decipher inbetween bouts of 4 letter words).
They didn't try to "fix" me. They didn't judge me or tell me that I was being emotional. They just let me get it out there....which really really helped.
As I said to one of my friends, when I started doing this training, I had TWO goals:
1.) To get faster
2.) To have fun
That's it. There were no goals regarding going further. There were no goals about placing.
I have a very demanding life. I use triathlon for stress relief. When the *thing* that I do to get away from my life starts to become more draining than my life.....I have a problem.
I don't feel that I need to cover a certain distance or hit a certain speed to be happy in triathlon. My identity is completely separate from the sport. Trust me, I swim with some people who's identities are completely wrapped up in tri's or Ironman. In fact, if the sport dissolved tomorrow, they'd disappear with it.
But that is not who I am. If I cannot get faster doing the volume of work that I can do, then I'm ok with it.
I'm not out to impress anyone. I'm out to have fun (see #2 above).
Now, unfortunately, I have to figure out if I can put the fun back into the sport or decide to bag the year and do some other things.
*Two people who do not read my blog. Although, just to be safe, I'm going to leave out incriminating evidence.
