Training Peaks was not my friend this week. Training wise, this was a rough week.
So often it’s easy to shout from the roof tops when training is going well then hide from the world when training is less than awesome. I’m guilty of this. When I have a bad training session it usually passes by the next day and I move on. And the last thing I want to do is spend more time in the experience of it. This week was on a whole new level…I was l u c k y enough to have three terrible training days in a row. What’s even better is that each day included a different discipline:
Thursday: an interval run I had been looking forward to all week. Not crazy fast intervals, but enough to work me a bit. Ended up not being able to hold the paces my coach had written because my heart rate was a solid 10 beats higher than normal.
Friday: a swim with challenging, but doable intervals. These were intervals I should have been able to hit. I felt like garbage and missed nearly all of them.
Saturday: a shorter long ride with nothing super challenging included. My legs felt like lead barely pushing any power.
Not exactly how I saw the end of the week playing out! When the Thursday run went poorly, I found myself ok with it thinking it was just one training session. And then after the swim on Friday, I found myself in a funk and wondering what was going on. After the bike ride on Saturday, I was all kinds of frustrated.
This is what kept coming up for me:
Why is this happening?
Can I get a break and just have one good training session?
Am I a good enough athlete to complete these workouts at all?
Will I be able to race the half marathon I have on my schedule in a week?
Should I just skip my Sunday training assuming it won’t go well?
My brain was having a grand ole pity party.
And then I took a mental step back. Analyzed all of these for what they were: simply thoughts. Our thoughts are how we interpret the world. The questions I was asking in my self inflicted pity party were not serving me. I didn’t like them.
So I decided to believe in something that did serve me:
A bad training session means nothing about me as a person or an athlete.
We all have good training days and bad training days. The good is relative and so is the bad.
Hell no, I will not attach my self worth to one, two or even three workouts.
The fate of any upcoming races is not determined by three workouts.
I will always keep showing up.
Any goal that matters requires massive action. Massive action means you keep taking action until you get the result you desire. You keep taking action. You keep showing up, lacing up your shoes, putting on your swim cap or hopping on the bike and putting in the work until you achieve the goal.
When I achieve the impossible goal I set for myself this year, these three workouts won’t even matter. I choose to be an athlete that takes the bad with the good knowing it’s all a part of the process towards achieving my goal.
My brain favors the pity party because it wants to keep me away from the possibility of failure. It wants me to give up when things get hard and take the easy way out. But I choose to open up to failure. In a single workout or even a race. Why? Because when I’m failing, I’m failing forward. Towards growth. And towards my goals.
Are you willing to fail forward?
XO.
V
