johnhirsch.org

“The sky is falling…hold back the day.” -Devil Driver

I love when I hear myself giving advice I should be taking. It echos in my head and I find myself trying to rebute the ideas I am expounding. It makes me want to hit myself with a shovel.

So many of my athletes are falling into the Crapuary trap. Its months till the first races yet some people are slaying themselves and putting themselves in a hole while thinking they are building a mountain. Post holidays and with the recent off season rest, motivations are high. We are a pool of gasoline and with a spark of motivation we can burn ourselfs up pretty fast. I keep telling people to relax, be patient and let it come. Our fitness is thin this early on, and we often can’t do what we wish we could do…just yet.

I myself have a bad habit. I am on a list called “pros” on twitter that someone made. When I check it I see what a dozen or so pros are up to. On any given day one of em is up to something epic. I might ignore 11 who aren’t training rediculously that day and focus on the one guy that is going huge. Then I beat myself up over it. If Ironman has taught me anything its that you must only focus on you, not your compitition. Your training, your race. Anything else is a the path to disaster.

Yet I am not immune. I went to Texas and put in work. Serious work. But that was a reach. Reaching is fine. But when you rech you must also be respectful. Disrespect is a path to disaster. I came back from Texas and didn’t want to take a recovery week. I fought hard against recovery and then last night my body gave me an ulitmatium: take some recovery or else. The “or else” is sickness and injury. My coach emailed me and said shut it down for a bit. He is right. I know because I am a coach and have told people this 3 times this week!

I got guilt about not training all the time. Or some other weird wiring problem that makes me want to train more and harder when I am cooked. So I am suggesting the following exersise: focus not on what I didn’t do, but what I did and what I will do between now and ironman. Because when you do that you realize how much you already did and you also realize that you need to be healthy and rested to do all that needs to be done.

(Pic: ahh, winter running, snow on rudy project glasses.)

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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 30th, 2010 at 12:00 am and is filed under blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.