The plan, faith, and judgement calls

It’s been a tough week so far. Being only the third day of the week, I’ve had some real highs and some real lows. The highs being my run last night – 21 miles in ~2:37; that’s moving. The lows – being the huge amount of fatigue that I’m carrying from last week and earlier in the season is catching up with me. Normally this heavy tired, worn out feeling wouldn’t bother me to much, but Mary is not feeling very good and is probably coming down with a cold. With me in this beat down state my immune system probably isn’t as strong as it needs to be to fight off something. As a result I took yesterday morning off – planning to do the swim today instead. However, this morning I followed my normal Wednesday routine of sleeping in – so I basically just wrote off an hour of swimming.

This is an area where I think I’ve really grown over the last two years – in my ability to react to how I’m feeling or take preventive actions to ensure that I’m able to continue training. In 2005 when I first started doing Ironmans, I would have never skipped a workout, in fact in the 9 months before my first Ironman I really only remember taking 1 workout off. While I’m definately not taking workouts off just because now, I’m much more flexible in my adherring to my plan. I definately miss more workouts then I’d like, but I have faith that I’m doing the work I need to, which let’s me make the judgement call to drop a workout in order to gain in the long run.

After all, it doesn’t make alot of sense to cut out some sleep to get an hour swim in – get sick and miss my Sunday brick. Missing the Sunday brick due to illness would be a much bigger loss then the hour swim.

Anyways here’s what’s in store for the rest of the week:

• Today: 2 hour aerobic ride + 30-45 minute run
• Thursday: 1 hour swim and a 2 hour ride + 30 minute run
• Friday:10 mile tempo run and a 2 hour ride
• Saturday: 1 hour swim, a 5k running race, and a easy spin
• Sunday: 5.5+ hour ride + ~1 hour run (the weather looks like I’ll be able to head outside!)

Stay healthy!