Ironman

My training is a Rollercoaster!

It’s T minus 15 weeks.

At the start of this week I hit a mega low. I was fatigued from the previous week’s training of tough sessions, we had 2 long rides in 3 days, and a tough 10km in between those rides. On the 2nd ride, what was supposed to be a chilled group coffee ride to Noordhoek, was a solo struggle with no coffee for me. I was dropped by the group pretty early on and my legs were in pain, and by the time I got to Chappies I was struggling so much that I just turned back and didn’t continue to Noordhoek. It was a very lonely ride and the only thing that was fast was the downward spiral that I was on emotionally.

My morale was super low. I wrote my coach an email in tears asking him to please adjust my programme to take the level down a notch, how everything takes me longer than he specifies because I’m slow, and how (for example) I can’t be expected to do a 8km run after a long ride at my normal run pace and it will definitely take me way over an hour because I struggle on the *brick sessions. I ended it off with the below…

An excerpt from the end of the sobbing email I wrote to my coach

He was very understanding and did adjust it, but only ever-so-slightly. I still did not believe that I would do the 8km run in 50 minutes at the end of a long week of training and immediately after a 3hr hilly ride.

Well, turns out rock bottom is a great place to bounce off from, and also a serious pep-talk down there from my friend Ironman-Aashiek was like a Godsend (although I was sobbing throughout that as well, LOL). I certainly learned to STFU, just show up and do what needs to be done, and leave the numbers to the professional who knows what he’s doing.

I had an awesome ride yesterday! And immediately afterwards I smashed a run in the scorching mid-morning heat as if it was the only thing I did that day…and in exactly 50 minutes!!

This journey will break you down and build you up time and time again. I consider it a huge blessing to be able to undertake it, and so happy that I embarked on it. I know there’s going to be a lot more lows and hoping for equally many highs. But I’m just trusting the process.

Oh oh and it was green blocks all the way this week on TrainingPeaks. That means I did all my sessions at the quantity I was supposed to. I live for green blocks! And yay for REST day on Sunday.

*brick session – a session where you do more than 1 activity, eg. bike/run, swim/run, swim/bike, etc.

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