No Excuses

Did about 14 hours this week, mostly fast stuff or hills. It was a relatively easy weekend since I tried to get much of my training earlier in the week.

Today (Sunday) was particularly tough, doing a hard 47 mile bike ride followed by a hilly 6 mile run at race effort pace. I'm sorry to say I couldn't hold the pace for the run and really struggled on the last mile, which happens to be straight up Hillsdale (250 ft climb over 3/4 of a mile). But I made it and hopefully it makes me stronger for my 1/2 Ironman next week (Mussleman in NY). I ran into Bill Dawson (President of the WC run club) near the end of my bike ride. He jumped on my wheel for a short while.

My sister Kerin came to visit on Friday with her kids, so I made sure I got my run in at lunch (7.5 miles at a good pace). 3350 meters on Saturday morning - decided to sleep in, then paint windows before my swim, so didn't get out with the Masters, but did the same workout solo.

In the 'thought for the day' category...

I was thinking of all the crap that has happened this year and how easy it would have been to just skip a race or stop training altogether.

This came to mind when I was reviewing my training log leading up to some of my earlier races and there is a multi-month section labelled "FLOOD" where I somehow managed to find the time to workout and have some pretty kick ass races (Ceasar Rodney half marathon in 1:22 and change; Broadstreet in 60min flat; the Savage AR - second team across the finish).

I had to be extremely creative in my training plan to get the right workouts in to race at this level even with chaos surrounding me during these months leading up to these races. And work hasn't been a piece of cake either.

I started thinking of my acathameoba parasite that almost blinded my right eye, but I managed to do pretty well in my first Ironman race. It would have been very easy to quit.

I crashed hard on my bike 5 weeks before Florida IM - bruised my tailbone (amongst other things). It was very painful to run for a couple of weeks after the crash, and I was very tired from all of the Ironman traning I had been doing. I could have taken time off, and blamed a bad time in Florida on my bike crash, but after some advise from the Doctor, I pushed through those last few weeks and qualified for Kona.

I'm training through this Lymes disease thing, and it would be really easy to ease up every time I started to cramp or feel run down and blame it on the Lymes, but I keep going figuring the run down feeling and cramping is probably all of the training I'm doing.

There are funerals, unplanned visitors, unexpected car breakdown, pulled hamstring, etc.

You know all the crap life throws at you.

A lot of people I know, use these things as roadblocks that stop them from doing what the set out to do.

I don't quite get this way of thinking. If something is important to you, you find a way to do it, not look for reasons not to do it. What do you think?