Tuesday, December 7, 2010

What does it mean?

double-rainbow Sorry, this post is not about Double Rainbows.

Back in May I stared drafting a blog post in response to an idea that had been hopping around the blogosphere. My friend Mark retweeted that Simon Whitfield tweeted that Anabel Luxford blogged that Kevin Collington tweeted that “the amount of time since an athlete’s last blog post is directly proportional to the probability that he/she is injured.”

I haven’t posted to this blog in almost three months. What does it mean? Is this hypothesis from Mark, Simon, Anabel and Kevin correct in my case? Am I injured? Sort of.

I felt like I was really dragging or struggling a lot through the last 2-3 months of my racing season, especially the final 3-4 weeks. I put in a very solid 6-month block of training from Jan 1st – June 30th, but then life caught up with me and the body started to break down. From late-June through early-October, I attended my dad’s 60th birthday party and my brother’s bachelor party, I was in two weddings and I helped to organize a training camp in Kona… all while continuing to work full-time at Microsoft and racing a few Continental Cups. Some folks can handle such a workload, but this year I couldn’t. I caught a mild head cold at the end of June and it didn’t really go away until early August. There is a lesson in there somewhere!

Through August and September, I felt tired and unmotivated a bit more frequently than I would have liked, but my numbers still looked good in races so I kept at it. Kelowna was a near miss, I coulda/woulda/shoulda been in the money at Pac Grove … but then it all caught up with me at Tuscaloosa and I just had *nothing* out there. So I decided to take a break. A physical and mental break.

After Tuscaloosa, I decided to stop “training” for a little while and to only work out socially. To a bystander it might still look like training, but from my perspective this was a night-and-day difference. Yes I raced half a dozen cyclocross races and a XC running race, and I ran a few 60-mile weeks, but all of that was cases of “Friend X wants to go here and do this, are you in?” So minimal stress. Minimal obligation. Minimal feeling of being overscheduled. It’s been a nice break!

I have plenty of funny stories to tell from the past 2.5 months but most of them have little to do with triathlon! I’ll write about a few of them and about some of my plans for racing/training/life 2011 in a future post as this one is already getting long. But I did want to stick my head up and say “hey” to the outside world again. You’ve not seen the last of me!

2 comments:

  1. Chris, I love reading your blog and am glad your back in action. Keep at it!

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  2. Thanks for the support! I'm stoked that you enjoy the blog!

    ReplyDelete