Often I will take my kids to the bus stop in my workout gear and start a long workout the second the bus rolls away. I frequently time to end workouts to greet my son off the bus in time for lunch. Occasionally when my husband has the flexibility to get our son off the bus from pre-K and keep an eye on him in the afternoon, I continue my effort until my daughters get home at the end of the school day, spending the entire day literally getting lost in the woods practicing navigating or getting in high volumes of vert. With so many voluminous workouts, the cleanliness of our home shows it. Usually I’d raid my kids’ Halloween, Christmas, and Valentine’s junk food that we typically reserve for long outings. Sometimes I’d plan enough to make a sandwich before heading out the door.
I have spent my fair share of hours performing hill repeats for hours on end through the winter, often going hours between seeing another person. Although I rarely run with music or podcasts to disassociate, I intentionally choose to go solo, only looking at my phone to give my husband on my ETA home.
Inner battle
Throughout training, I constantly had two voices battling between my ears of was I training too much, risking ever arriving at the start line. Additionally, my feeling of my fitness ebbed and flowed each week. Numerous times, I felt fat and out of shape during a workout that I killed 5, 6, 7, 8 days before. What saved me was the knowledge that it takes two weeks to lose fitness (if in fact I wasn’t continuing to train.) A huge difference from my prior big training pre-kids was this volume wasn’t nearly as fatiguing, since I have another ten years of training under my belt. In fact there were times I put in 20, 30, and even 40 hours of training and didn’t feel fatigued. At times, I felt invincible!
Other times, I had kinks in my armor. When I caught a cold during a key training cycle, I opted to take a day completely off and pull the plug on another hard workout once I realized I would not achieve a quality workout. Ironically, just days earlier, I evaluated my training log and determined there was more to lose by training more than less at this point in the game. Although I enjoyed training much more than researching gear, I channeled my time into that task. Other times, snow hindered my plans for workouts and I needed to adapt. I would not lull myself into mediocrity, allowing my bar to be set lower as a woman.
Next up
Be sure to follow my blog to read my race report and follow along for my other adventures!
Related:
