The Only Thing We Have To Fear...

One quick post before I go to sleep on the night before the race. These are the top 25 things I FEAR tomorrow (hey, it's my short list); we'll see how many don't come true!

1. Oversleeping the alarm
2. Being too nervous to eat breakfast

ON THE SWIM
3. Having my goggles fly off when I jump into the river
4. Having my goggles kicked/punched off my face in the water by another athlete and/or being swum into/over by another athlete
5. Leaky goggles
6. Seeing dead fish/a dead body/anything unsavory in the water (c'mon, these are my FEARS)
7. Drinking any of the river
8. GI issues from said drinkage of the river
9. A long bike transition

ON THE BIKE
10. A flat tire (or two!)
11. Not making the bike cutoff times
12. Dehydration on the bike
13. Crashing on the bike
14. Drafting penalties on the bike (4 bike lengths back is a lot and hard for me to gauge)
15. Difficulty climbing hills
16. Somehow missing the Team Sisk cheering section in La Grange
17. A long run transition

ON THE RUN
18. GI issues
19. Leg cramps
20. GI issues
21. Somehow missing the Team Sisk cheering section along the run course
22. GI issues
23. Blisters
24. GI issues
25. Not crossing the finish line by midnight

Now that I've listed my fears, I hope they won't occupy my mind tonight. Time to get some sleep!




- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Twitchy in Taper

 A couple months ago, I told Wes that triathletes seem to be a twitchy lot.  I'd been for a swim at the Y early that morning and in looking around at the swimmers in the pool, I felt like I could tell those who were triathletes and those who were just going for an early morning swim.  You see, the triathletes were, well, twitchy.  Wes asked me what I meant by that, and it was hard to articulate.  The ones I pegged as triathletes were the ones who were timing their laps and flying through their speedwork; they had bike water bottles on the pool deck as well as their workouts listed on paper and in ziploc bags so they wouldn't get wet; AND they looked like they couldn't wait to hop on their bikes.  There was just something about them, something twitchy that I have begun to recognize in myself.

Two weeks ago, I entered the 3-week taper phase of my training.  It's the last bit of training when you dial it all back to give your body a chance to rest and recover before race day.  I've posted on facebook a bit about my love/hate relationship with taper, and I know plenty of pure runners and triathletes who agree.  For reasons that are obvious, taper is a welcome relief from the long and often intense hours of training, and that certainly holds true with my Ironman training.  Taper means shorter workouts and a bit of a break on the zone 4 heart rate, high-intensity work.  In that regard, taper also means that I get a little bit of my non-training life back.  Even an hour or two gained back on the weekends translates into all kinds of possibility: long naps and much needed rest, a return to my love of baking, or even just watering the dehydrated flowers and tomato plants (the tomato plants, sadly, have not survived my full training plan, may they rest in peace). In short, taper means balance.

But taper also means faith in the training plan: faith that all of the hard work will pay off and that easing off the workouts will mean waking fully rested on race day.  Taper means rest, but when you've been going as hard and as long as you do in a full iron distance training plan, it's honestly hard to rest.  Oh sure, the first few shorter workouts in taper were great.  I felt really tired as my body began to relax into it, and I actually slept quite well.  But then I started to have (the usual) doubts about resting so much.  Somehow a 3 hour bike ride didn't seem like enough riding.  I mean, there's NO WAY that a 45-miler two weeks before the race could possibly be a good idea.   Today, a week before the race, my workout was a 1-hour run.  For months I've been doing 1-hour runs twice during the week.  THAT was my long run today?  In preparation for a MARATHON after a 2.4 mile swim and a 112 mile bike ride?  Good grief, who writes these plans?  My body has grown accustomed to the energy burn, and now it wants an outlet.  What it needs is rest, but what it wants is to go.

The love/hate relationship becomes apparent.  I relish the rest, and I fear (and thus hate) it at the same time.  What's more, I'm not sleeping well.  At all.  I need to sleep, but my body wants to go.  I've awakened multiple times in the middle of the night the past week only to find my mind racing with thoughts of, well, racing.  I go to sleep thinking of Louisville, and I wake to the same thoughts.  In case any of you are reading this blog for the first time, I feel compelled to reiterate that I am not going to win this race!  My ability to complete it isn't even guaranteed.  I will need every last minute of the day to get myself across that finish line.  Wes keeps telling me to relax and embrace the taper, but I honestly don't know how to do that.  I think I am relaxed, only to wake in the middle of the night.  What makes me feel better?  A workout.  My life has become insane.  I love it, but it is insane.

I'm not sure what kind of company Wes thinks I've been for the past couple weeks, but periodically I will say or do something twitchy-like (such as waking at 3:30am, going to the Y for a long swim, going non-stop until I meet him for lunch, and then talking a thousand miles a minute the entire time we're together), and he shakes his head and smiles.  This Ironman that I am married to knows all about twitchy taper and recognizes it in his wife.  I've given up on trying to convince him that it's not the taper effect.  It is, and I know it.  So now there is really nothing to do but wait.  I have one more week to go.  Actually, I have one more week not to go.  I plan to do my best to try to rest, relax, and soak up this last week of taper.

What I really want to do is race.  :)

The End Is In Sight

I have fallen shamefully behind on updating this blog.  Summer, training, vacation, and life in general happened, and here I am, two months since my last post and now just under two weeks until the race. 

The past couple months have held both ups and downs in my training.  At the beginning of the summer Wes and I went on some incredible bike rides.  We rode the Silver Comet Trail from Georgia to Alabama at the end of May, and I logged 96 miles the first day and then 106 miles the second day, setting new distance records for myself.  A week or two after Silver Comet, we rode the Tour de Cure century ride and enjoyed the fun of a pace line and faster speeds.  I was on a real high from these longer distance rides, boosting my confidence in my ability to go the distance.

In July we went on vacation to Maine and enjoyed some long bike rides around the beautiful countryside in southeastern Maine and long runs along the beaches.  We attempted to do some north Atlantic Ocean swims in our wetsuits, but that water was just too frigid cold.  We went number after about 10 minutes!  Vacation in general was great, and it was nice to see some new scenery while we were training.

Incredibly, aside from a few minor aches and pains here and there, I've remained injury free.  I'm knocking on wood as I type that.  With 13 days until the race, I'm not quite out of the woods.  I've been swimming often, with plenty of open water swim practice.  I've swum the full 2.4 miles once in the pool and once in Jordan Lake, and I'm planning on one more go at it this week.  I feel pretty good about my swim, and even though I won't be fast, I also won't be last coming out of the water.

I know I can bike the distance; I came close three times this summer with three century rides.  They were early on in the summer, though, and I do worry about being able to get through 112 miles quickly enough.  In case I haven't mentioned in a previous blog, I'm not particularly fast at any of the three disciplines.  It really will take me until close to midnight to finish this race.  Before this season, I tend to ride distance around 15mph.  I've had a tough time maintaining even that pace this season, for some reason, so I am reasonably concerned.  But I will do what I can do and hope for the best.  I'd really hoped to get faster as the training season went on, but it just hasn't come to pass.

I've had a long love affair with running, but at the beginning of this training season I was ready for a divorce from it.  I don't know what happened, but every run early on this year was an exercise in patience and torture.  I just didn't want to do it.  As the summer wore on, though, I kept at it and gradually began to enjoy it again.  I went for my two-hour taper long run yesterday and really loved every minute of it.  I kept up a pace that was faster than what I meant to run, but I honestly couldn't slow myself down.  Yeah, it was one of those good runs.  But I've run a couple of marathons, and I know what I'm in for with the marathon I'll run to complete the Ironman.  Actually, I should be so lucky as to only experience what I've experienced on previous marathons.  It's going to hurt.  A lot, I understand.  I'm at once excited and terrified of what I'm going to experience.

I want so much to finish this race by midnight.  It's become a very important goal to me, and I dream about it, about crossing that finish line in the dark of the night with hundreds of people cheering me across the line.  I've also imagined what it would be like not to finish in time, to have come so close to the goal but then to fall short.  I decided a few weeks ago that thinking about what if I don't make it does me no good.  My energy is better spent imagining success.  I keep thinking that if I can visualize it, maybe I can make it happen.  And I keep visualizing my success.  It looks so good!

As the race date draws near, I find myself contemplating this journey and the people and experiences that have brought me to where I am right now.  I look forward to posting a few more times before August 28 and capturing these thoughts.