Humble pie and other life lessons

First off, I want to thank everybody for their input on my coaching situation. I must have devoted ten to fifteen hours consulting with friends, other coaches, and my own training logs. Finally, I made an appointment to talk to him and we had a looooooong conversation in which I voiced my concerns. I explained exactly what I would like to do differently and why. Then we discussed the pro's and con's of his way versus my way. After about an hour of this, we were wrapping things up and he said something like this:

"Your goal is to have a good race. Every athlete I've ever spoken to has had the same story, 'I took it easy in the first half, and I couldn't believe how many people I passed in the last hour.' Last year I had an athlete tell me that he felt like he executed his race perfectly. He felt like he could have gone ten minutes faster, but he finished knowing that he had raced strong the whole way through."

BANG! It hit me.

"Wait, what do you think that I think that a 'good race' is?" I asked. In our initial conversation about goals I had told him that this was an 'unfinished business race,' and that I wanted to have a 'good experience' before I said goodbye to triathlon for good. It occurred to me that maybe I should have been more specific. "I don't want to walk away from this race wondering how well I could have done. I don't want to be smiling in my finishing photo or walking comfortably the next day. My idea of a 'good' race is performing well right up until the finish line and then going right to the medical tent because I left it all out on the course." Don't get me wrong, I don't want to wind up in the medical tent at mile 23, but I'm not really one to revel in the accomplishment of "just finishing."

"Oh." He didn't say so, but I think that changed everything. "Well not everything," he corrected me. "Just the way we'll be practicing making decisions." Now my program involves a lot more hard work, a lot more hours, and a hell of a lot more running. For the first time since starting this build-up, my legs are satisfactorily trashed.

Part of this whole "growing up" thing is figuring out when I'm wrong, and then admitting to it. I was right in that he was training me to be slow, but I'm also finding that I've been wrong about what my body can handle, too. If there's one nugget of knowledge to be gained from this whole experience, it's that even Claires need rest.

Every endurance book ever reminds us not to commit the sin of "going too hard on your easy days and going too easy on your hard days." I didn't think that I was guilty of this, I thought that I just wasn't all that great at short bursts of speed. But now that I have somebody else looking at subjective feedback, I'm seeing that I crap out on the hard days when I've mucked it up by spicing up the easy days.

The other golden rule of sport is to "rest as hard as your train, because it is during recovery that you get stronger." Yeah, yeah, I know that. Everybody knows that. But I've always looked to extreme ultraendurance athletes and figured, if resting should be a quarter of your pie, then bake a bigger pie so that the volume of your rest slice can be higher. And I've gotten pretty good at that. But just because you beat your body into submission so that it can pull out a marathon PR the day after a half marathon PR, doesn't mean that that marathon was the best you had in you. I'm trying to learn to be patient. Trying.

Since I started working with a coach, my crappy days have been phenominally crappy. Last week I went for a ride with the big boys where my legs were loading up after only about 10 seconds, I was struggling to hold a 20mph average in a pack, and I even got dropped on the downhills. "What the hell have they done with my Claire?" asked a Straight Man Over 40 who I call Meat Wad. But when I'm on, I'm on fire! A 42-minute 10K, a century that was a hair over 5 hours (and had those who rode with me last year, including Meat Wad picking their jaws up off the ground), and a 15-minute 1000 yard time trial.

My job now is to just trust and hope that it will all come together so that November 29 is an "on" day. I've been doing paper triathlons, and inflating my goals to about 1,000 psi. I'm trying my best to remember that dreams are one thing, but that goals are reached by a million tiny decisions. Right now all I can do is focus on not fucking up those tiny decisions (i.e. resisting the urge to pull a marathon out of my ass just to prove to myself that I still can). In the end, I'm glad I have the help, even if it is putting me in the poorhouse.

(Photo credits: Sly in the Morning, EldarKinSlayer, © Martindata | Dreamstime.com, Active Running