Brian's Next Blog Attempt

First off, let me say that I am not dead.  The cove swim on Friday was not the last workout I ever get to do.  It was the first of the season where I went without my wetsuit though, and that was fantastic!

However, it was also the beginning of my pre-race plans totally unraveling. After the swim, I hung out with friends until insanely late, then I didn't sleep well that night at all.  I got at most 4 hours of sleep, but probably more like 2-3.  The next day I got up early to mentor for the TNT team.  I cut my part of the workout WAY short, but then sat around in the sun for many hours, slowing getting sunburned and dehydrated.  By the time I left the workout, I had to hurry to get down to SDI packet pickup in time.  After I finished there, I ended up going to the OB street fair (which I had originally planned to not attend).  Needless to say, this did not end up being the relaxing afternoon I had planned on.  While there, I ran into Brad who bought me an Irish carbomb (Thanks Brad--even if it was the day before race day!)  From there, I rushed to make the carb loading dinner I had planned and finally made it home for the first time that evening at around 10:00 and hadn't yet packed for the race.  At this point, I was totally exhausted, but had to push through and get packed before going to bed.  I finally made it to bed around 10:45 and managed to fall asleep pretty quickly, but with a 4:30 wakeup time, I wasn't able to sleep enough.

Race day, I wasn't feeling all that bad, but I was very tired.  Everything went pretty smoothly as I setup my transition area.  The only scary part is that I almost forgot to put on my timing chip.  I'm really glad I noticed it on the ankle of the guy next to me.  I'm gonna have to start practicing with that! 

My swim went really well--I was trying to beat my 18:58 time from last year and I got out of the water at 17:13 according to my watch.  That put me in a good mood!  Then as I headed over to transition, I heard lots of people cheering for me.  To be honest, I'm not entirely sure who all was there, but I heard my name a lot.  THANK YOU EVERYONE!  Knowing that you all were watching made me really hurry through transition and make it look good. :) 

My bike also went really well.  I passed quite a few people, but got passed by more people than I wanted.  I wasn't really pushing as hard as I could have.  My heartrate stayed around 81% and I didn't feel like pushing harder.  I told myself at the time it was because I was saving myself for the run.  I did manage to finish the bike in 53:51 according to my watch, which was 43 seconds than last year, so I was pretty happy about that too.

My plan was to really push until it hurt on the run, but once again, I couldn't get going like I wanted.  I was planning to keep an 8:00 pace, but I did my first mile at 8:39 and went down from there.  At this point, it was a totally mental game.  I kept trying to push myself to go faster, but just didn't have the drive to do it.  I kept coming up with all kinds of excuses:

I'm tired
My back hurts (I had strained it a bit on Friday)
I'm hungry (Didn't eat enough breakfast, then I didn't have any nutrition during the race at all)
I'm hot
This hurts

I did at least have enough drive left to keep myself running instead of walking.  As people passed me, I tried to keep pace with them just like I did with Kim at Carlsbad half, but I just couldn't keep it up for long. The excuses kept getting to me.  I did start to pass some people I knew though and once I passed them, I used that as motivation to keep going because I didn't want to pass someone I knew just to have them catch up with me again.  (I won't embarrass said people by calling them out here, especially since I know how many people beat me! :)

Finally with a mile and a half to go, I remembered a video that Denner had just introduced me to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=obdd31Q9PqA

(Ugh--I really need to figure out how to embed things with this software--I know my posts are way too text heavy as it is...)

So for the rest of the race, I just concentrated on "Just do it."  I was able to pick up my pace for a while, but then I kept falling back.  In the end all I was able to do was increase my heartrate and respiration rate without actually going faster.  With half a mile to go, a guy I'd been leapfrogging caught up to me again and told me to keep pace with him.  I was able to keep up with him on the way in. 

Crossing the finish line, I saw that my finish time was 2:11:13 which was 3:18 faster than my time from last year.   My run was 1:02 faster than last year.  I have to say, this really disappointed me because I've been doing a LOT more running and I thought I'd be able to beat last year's run by at least 5 minutes and I was hoping by 7 minutes.

I was even more disappointed to check the results and find myself at 64th place out of 102 in my AG.  Once again, I had failed to make even the top 50% in my age group.  I did  perk up a little when I realized I was only 6:13 off from the top half of my AG though.

I know that I have only myself to blame for not meeting my goals.  I didn't follow my pre-race plan at all and that really affected my performance.  Then again, as Ann said, it's okay to be a "social triathlete" too.  And I certainly did have fun with all my weekend activities that kept me me from sleeping all weekend.  Certainly I don't look too upset after the finish as this picture shows.

But then again, I am competitive enough that failing to meet my goals really bugs me.  Guess I'll try the plan again next time.  I now have two goals for my next race:

1.  Do a 50 minute 10K
2.  Finish in the top half of my AG.

I'll let you know how that goes. :)

Apparently I had some success in sleeping last night because today I'm in a fantastic mood!  Instead of my normal routine of staying up until midnight trying to get everything finished, I got off the computer last night around 10:15, got ready for bed, and then read for 20 minutes.  Once I got into bed, I fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.  And even better is that I managed to sleep later this morning.  I've been waking up between 4 and 4:45 in the morning lately, but this morning I didn't wake up until 5:15.  I laid in bed until 7:30 and I didn't think that I slept more, but I may have because it didn't at all feel like I was awake for 2 hours and I am in a really great mood now!

And for whatever reason, I am REALLY looking forward to the cove swim tonight.  I have no idea why, but I'm just going with it.

But do you ever have those thoughts of "What if this is my last day on Earth?"  That thought popped into my head today. I guess it's not an unexpected thought at all because today is the anniversary of the death of the brother of a good friend of mine, so I've been talking to her about that.  If this does happen to be my last blog entry ever, know that I went doing my favorite workout--the Friday Cove swim and that I didn't regret a moment of it!  (Well, unless I am killed in an accident on the way to the cove and then know that I'm really pissed at whoever ran into me and denied me my final cove swim!) :)

Here I am 3 days before SDI.  Apparently I had more of a plan for this race than I thought.  Now I wish we had the technology for me to track your eyes while reading this just so I could play a sound as you read.  But for now, just imagine the ding and buzzer from Family Feud as you read the yes and no responses.  So have I been following the plan?

1. Sleep: NO Despite the fact that the weather has returned to comfortable sleeping weather and the fact that I've been very tired, I still haven't been sleeping well.  I get to bed right around midnight every night and then have problems falling asleep with my mind racing about all the things I need to do and about my love life (or lack thereof).  Then for some reason I wake up every morning between 4 and 4:45.  Most mornings I can fall back asleep after an hour or so, but this morning, I had so much on my mind that I couldn't sleep and finally just got out of bed at 6:45.  It's possible that I'd sleep more if I got to bed at a reasonable hour, but so far I haven't been able to force myself to get to bed earlier.
   
2. Taking it easy on my workouts and fully recovering physically:  NO  I'm sure the lack of sleep isn't helping my recovery, but neither is my continuing to workout.  I thought I could still go to the gym on Monday and recover by the race, but my trainer had my do 50 pullups and I'm still sore from that this morning.  I went to track on Tuesday and did that all out.  I took it easy at swim last night, but I think that's still also contributing to my sore shoulders this morning.  I did take today off from the gym though, so hopefully that will help.  But, I'm not going to skip the Friday cove swim since this is the last time I'll get to do it this season because I'm doing PacGrove/Nation's Tri swims on Friday nights until September.  (I will try to get out for an ocean swim on the weekends though.)
3. Preparing my mental game:  NO  I need to be totally pumped for this race and be focused on pushing until it hurts.  Instead, I'm just getting annoyed at all the things this race is keeping me from doing and I'm really looking forward to it being over.  Maybe I've lost that competitive edge.  Maybe my priorities have changed so I just want to be more social than hardcore.  Or maybe I just am not getting enough sleep to care about racing.  I hope I can get in at least one race this year where I've got the mental game dialed in so I can give it my all.

San Diego International is less than a week away and I'm starting to get nervous about it.  It's the last of the races I did last year, so it's my last chance to compare year to year times.  I feel like I haven't been training as much as I wanted and won't get to see the kind of improvement I'd like.

But I noticed something from what I did at Wildflower and from watching people at Rock N' Roll Marathon.  I finished Wildflower really strong--I was able to sprint the chute at the end.  I thought it felt good at the time, but then when I watched a bunch of people at RNR do the same thing, I thought they looked foolish because they had left way too much out on the course.

So, my plan for SDI is to leave nothing on the course.  Carlsbad half this year was the only race I've done so far where I really had to dig deep and push myself to keep going.  My plan is to do that same thing with SDI, even if it's to the point where I totally break down and simply can't finish.  I have no idea if I can do it.  Even thinking about it now scares me to death.  I know I have to be in the right mindset and be ready to hurt that day.  But I know I won't ever reach my potential until I find out where my limit is.  At Carlsbad, I pushed way past where I thought I could.  I wanted to stop really bad and thought that I kept going, but I didn't--I just kept pushing through.  I know I can do the same here, now I just need to do it.

This sport is 99.9+% mental.  This weekend will be a far greater mental challenge than physical, starting this whole week leading up to the race preparing myself to go all out on Sunday.  Wish me luck! :)

And thanks for talking to me about this and helping me decide what I need to do, Marty!

Alright--today I was really tired after staying out far too late last night.  As I sat at work, I realized I had a headache  and that I wasn't really feeling like a swim today.  I figured the only way I was going to get out there was to take a painkiller, but I discovered that the Advil I keep at my desk expired in February and the company pain killers have been hidden away somewhere now, so I went without.  Then the clouds rolled in and I envisioned a really cold swim.  But I had already told people I was going to show up, so I went down to the cove anyway.  It was nice that even with the clouds it was pretty warm out. 

So I got in the water and had one of the best swims I've had in a long time.  I got into my rhythm right away--I never once felt uncoordinated or out of breath.  I even managed to pretty well keep up with the group the whole way out and back.  That was absolutely the best swim I've had in a long time.  I hope I feel this good for SDI!