Part 2 of Toughness Goals and Doubt
Writing about doubt or depression is hard for me. When I'm feeling good, I don't have much to say about the subject. When I'm feeling bad, I don't want to talk about it. So I'll split the temporal difference and write about it how it felt in light of the fact that most of it has thankfully passed.
I started training for this year's Ironman in November almost seven months ago. I can't believe how long ago that was. The race is now five weeks away. Obviously the road hasn't always been paved with gold. Occasionally it has been paved with bricks. Vertically. Walls are an inevitable part of a long undertaking, and sometime in mid-January I hit my first one.
I told Susan that I was done training. I wasn't having fun with my training, and I wasn't sure I wanted to keep going with it. I was just plain tired of the training. I think the mental aspect of the training was really starting to wear on me. I was riding indoors on the bike trainer which even with a movie is dull at best, and I was swimming on my own, which is also not my favorite thing to do. On that particular day I had finished about half of my swim workout when I decided that I had had enough. I threw myself a little hissy fit, vented on Susan and sulked in the rec center hot tub for a good hour while Susan finished her workout. It took a few days, but eventually I got over myself and kept slogging away at the training.
A few months later in mid-March I hit my second wall. I got totally sick of the training again. I was doing all of my training on my own - the swimming, the long runs, and still spending a fair amount of time on the indoor bike trainer since the weather refused to get nice and stay nice when I needed it to. Typical Colorado spring, but frustrating nonetheless. I decided then and there that I needed to start sacrificing my preferred training schedule to get workouts in with friends. It was the best decision I could have possibly made. Not only did I start enjoying my workouts, but I started doing intensity workouts like running Sanitas and track workouts that I never would have done on my own. And as a bonus I got to hang out with friends, which is always good.
I hit the final wall just four weeks ago. It was very different from the first two. Now I was ready to train, but I couldn't see to get the weather I needed in order to do it. It was a Friday evening and the forecast for the weekend was rain and more rain. I couldn't believe it, I NEEDED the weekend to get in a really long ride and run and I really didn't know what to do. It seems silly in retrospect, but it's important for me to realize that the feelings were very real at that point. I was so defeated, so depressed, so convinced that the training would not happen, and that my race wouldn't live up to my expectations. And my expectations aren't that high, but they were high enough that I REALLY needed to get some quality workouts in...pronto.
I know I will experience those feelings of doubt and defeat again in the future - I seriously doubt that there is anything I can change about my psyche that will change that. What I can change, at least a little bit, is how I deal with it. Well, actually, that's not likely to change much either. No matter how much I tell myself it's going to be ok, I'm not going to believe me. What I can change is how I interact with the people around me. I certainly wasn't horrible to Susan, but I wasn't the best person I could be either. I didn't reach out to her and ask for help - I wasn't looking for solutions, I was only looking for justification and validation of my feelings at the time. That's silly, because my feelings didn't need to be validated, they were real...to me. What I needed to do was talk to other people so that I would be able to widen my focus just enough to see my way around the wall. Hopefully I'll remember that lesson at some future date.
As it turns out, I dodged the rain on both days and managed to get in my longest run ever on Saturday and a six hour ride on Sunday as well. It completely turned my mood around and I've had a string of great training weeks ever since.
The less immediate and more long-running component of doubt is race day itself. In any race, things can go and will go wrong and the race may fail to live up to your expectations. If the race is short, there's usually another race around the corner, and it's usually not hard to learn your lessons and apply them in your next race. Ironman, on the other hand, does not come around often for most people. You invest a lot of time and energy into training and preparing for it, and yet it's such a long race that you are almost guaranteed that something will go wrong. Or a lot of things may go wrong, even for the best, smartest and most well-prepared athletes. That's very humbling, and knowing that things are going to go wrong releases me from the temptation to obsess about a perfect race. It forces me to think about the kinds of things that might go wrong and how I'll handle them. Or how I'll handle something totally unexpected. It also turns my attention away from anxiety about the race itself and makes me think more on the training that I have done and the things that I will do in the next five weeks to prepare for the race. Not that I tend to obsess or anything.
I started training for this year's Ironman in November almost seven months ago. I can't believe how long ago that was. The race is now five weeks away. Obviously the road hasn't always been paved with gold. Occasionally it has been paved with bricks. Vertically. Walls are an inevitable part of a long undertaking, and sometime in mid-January I hit my first one.
I told Susan that I was done training. I wasn't having fun with my training, and I wasn't sure I wanted to keep going with it. I was just plain tired of the training. I think the mental aspect of the training was really starting to wear on me. I was riding indoors on the bike trainer which even with a movie is dull at best, and I was swimming on my own, which is also not my favorite thing to do. On that particular day I had finished about half of my swim workout when I decided that I had had enough. I threw myself a little hissy fit, vented on Susan and sulked in the rec center hot tub for a good hour while Susan finished her workout. It took a few days, but eventually I got over myself and kept slogging away at the training.
A few months later in mid-March I hit my second wall. I got totally sick of the training again. I was doing all of my training on my own - the swimming, the long runs, and still spending a fair amount of time on the indoor bike trainer since the weather refused to get nice and stay nice when I needed it to. Typical Colorado spring, but frustrating nonetheless. I decided then and there that I needed to start sacrificing my preferred training schedule to get workouts in with friends. It was the best decision I could have possibly made. Not only did I start enjoying my workouts, but I started doing intensity workouts like running Sanitas and track workouts that I never would have done on my own. And as a bonus I got to hang out with friends, which is always good.
I hit the final wall just four weeks ago. It was very different from the first two. Now I was ready to train, but I couldn't see to get the weather I needed in order to do it. It was a Friday evening and the forecast for the weekend was rain and more rain. I couldn't believe it, I NEEDED the weekend to get in a really long ride and run and I really didn't know what to do. It seems silly in retrospect, but it's important for me to realize that the feelings were very real at that point. I was so defeated, so depressed, so convinced that the training would not happen, and that my race wouldn't live up to my expectations. And my expectations aren't that high, but they were high enough that I REALLY needed to get some quality workouts in...pronto.
I know I will experience those feelings of doubt and defeat again in the future - I seriously doubt that there is anything I can change about my psyche that will change that. What I can change, at least a little bit, is how I deal with it. Well, actually, that's not likely to change much either. No matter how much I tell myself it's going to be ok, I'm not going to believe me. What I can change is how I interact with the people around me. I certainly wasn't horrible to Susan, but I wasn't the best person I could be either. I didn't reach out to her and ask for help - I wasn't looking for solutions, I was only looking for justification and validation of my feelings at the time. That's silly, because my feelings didn't need to be validated, they were real...to me. What I needed to do was talk to other people so that I would be able to widen my focus just enough to see my way around the wall. Hopefully I'll remember that lesson at some future date.
As it turns out, I dodged the rain on both days and managed to get in my longest run ever on Saturday and a six hour ride on Sunday as well. It completely turned my mood around and I've had a string of great training weeks ever since.
The less immediate and more long-running component of doubt is race day itself. In any race, things can go and will go wrong and the race may fail to live up to your expectations. If the race is short, there's usually another race around the corner, and it's usually not hard to learn your lessons and apply them in your next race. Ironman, on the other hand, does not come around often for most people. You invest a lot of time and energy into training and preparing for it, and yet it's such a long race that you are almost guaranteed that something will go wrong. Or a lot of things may go wrong, even for the best, smartest and most well-prepared athletes. That's very humbling, and knowing that things are going to go wrong releases me from the temptation to obsess about a perfect race. It forces me to think about the kinds of things that might go wrong and how I'll handle them. Or how I'll handle something totally unexpected. It also turns my attention away from anxiety about the race itself and makes me think more on the training that I have done and the things that I will do in the next five weeks to prepare for the race. Not that I tend to obsess or anything.