It's been awhile.
In the past month a lot has happened. I guess the biggest tri-challenge was that I did 4 races in 4 weeks.
It was one of the harder things I've done.
I'm coming up on my final tri of the year. I have fully recovered from the 4 weeks of racing. I still have one race left. Of course, I'm being asked, "What's your schedule look like next year"?
Other than 2 races, which I'm pretty set on, I haven't decided. I told Liz about a month ago that I was planning on taking time off.
I want to use that time to think about goals for next year. I also want time away from triathlon where I can look back over 2017 and clearly look at what I accomplished.
I can tell you this. One of my goals for 2017 was to get athletes excited about short course. I wanted to change people's perspectives from short courses being stepping stones to the 70.3 and full IM to training for short/intermediate races as the end goal.
This all happened because I was surprised to find out that many athletes are unaware that
1.) They can qualify for Nationals.
2.) At Nationals, they can qualify for the World Championship.
3.) When people find out you've qualified, they instantly refer to you as "the fast one".
All good stuff, right?
They didn't realize that short and intermediate distances had an entire population of people working toward becoming a part of Team USA.
You want to feel the excitement? Join this FB Group.
As it happened, in July, I qualified for Nationals in 2018.
I'd been planning on making 2018 a year of 70.3 focus. Well....then.....*everyone* actually started getting excited about trying to qualify for Nationals.
All of a sudden, triathletes, who....for YEARS....tried to convince me there was NOTHING BETTER than doing Ironman.....wanted to qualify for 2018 Nationals.
Short course triathletes are a different breed. Not better. Not worse. Just different.
I realized that I can't get people excited about qualifying for Nationals, and then NOT SHOW UP MYSELF.
For those of you who have been asking me about Nationals in 2018. YES. I WILL BE THERE. My plan is to do the OLY. I've done the back to back a couple of times now. I'd rather stick around and cheer for people on Sunday than race again.
Along these lines, I told Liz that I was going to take some time off, starting right after my next race. We got into a very short conversation about next year. (Srsly, mentally...I just didn't want to go into 2018 goals in much detail).
She said a couple of things that struck me. I sort of tucked them away for when I was ready to deal with them.
This week, I was ready to think about the conversation that Liz and I had.
Based on recent training, I knew that I had to/wanted to change my approach to some goals. Based on recent training, meaning that training has been going exceptionally well, I am ready to change a few things around.
I scribbled out a bunch of notes:
--race time goals
--qualification goals
--training goals
I want to finish off 2017 strong.
Then, I'll have some downtime.
THEN, I'll see if those goals that I scribbled out, early one morning, still make sense.
After that is all said and done, I'll put together my race schedule for 2018.