I'm not sure what it is. Well, I know exactly what it is: The heat and the volume of training is tweaking me to my limits. I'm spending all day trying to sleep and catch my breath from doing nothing at all today.
But it's not like I've been doing nothing at all. Swimming 3500 yards, running 5.6 miles, biking for 70 at 17.5 mph, then running another 5.6 miles yesterday would be considered a lot by anybody's standards. Doing it between the hours of Noon and 8 PM in Central Texas in June takes it to a whole other level. No, this wasn't a race. This was just another typical day of weekend training for Ironman Wisconsin.
I argued with my wife about getting started on the training so late in the day. She had some hair thing in the morning and I had to watch our son, so I bowed out and said I'd do my training in the afternoon. I do recall saying something about training in 96 degrees and 50% humidity being "self-induced thermo-suicide."
It was a big mistake. I drank six tall water bottles, two aero bottles, and two 70 oz. Camelbaks during yesterday's workouts and didn't even come close to staying hydrated. That's 2.56 gallons of gatorade, and I still only peed once the entire time and then not again until about 3 in the morning.
I faintly remember coming in from my first run, nearly spraying sweat from every pore, cursing an endless tirade at my wife under my breath about what I'll nicely refer to as a "scheduling conflict" and walking straight into the shower. I put it as cold as possible in an effort to try to cool myself down. I chilled out enough to gain coordination to throw my leg over the bike and then headed out for 4 hours of punishment. At least this would have some airflow to it.
An hour into the ride, I realized I couldn't put forth the effort needed. Any real speed resulted in invisible arms crushing my chest and neck, my eyes bulging like those poor bastards stuck out on the Mars landscape in Total Recall. I found myself sitting on a bridge railing in the shade, trying to stop the dizziness and impending collapse.
After a few minutes, I recalculated my day's strategy and went at it again. This isn't bad. This is perfect IM training. It's not all about endurance; some of it is about smarts. "I'm going to get this all done," I told myself. "You can do this, just be smart and scale it back some."
So, I had change the bike part of my workout from one of exacting wattage numbers to one of hydration practice. It's a good skill to know. I've learned quite a bit about it while trying to do this volume in this heat. I thought I knew all about it after 5 years of tri-training in Texas. I know lots more after half a month training like this than I ever did before. I got the workout done and was actually biking and running pretty strong at the end. I was still peeing dust, though.
In a tri-world where we only want to talk about our successes and feel bad about talking about our failures, it is important to remember that proper recovery is a skill. It helps us in the long term to avoid injury and eventually burnout. You are not a pussy because you backed out of a workout. You just might be really smart. That missed workout might have gained you a second in speed in the short term, but destroyed you in the long term.
My coach just sent out a link to "mandatory reading" about proper recovery and symptoms of overtraining from a website called The Podium. I read through it and found that I've got about 99 out of the 100 symptoms, so I'm enjoying a nice Nuun cocktail and writing this post instead of doing today's 1:40:00 run. Oh, I'll probably do it, but I'm counting walking around the block with my wife and son as part of it.
As I'm writing this, my wife just came in from the front yard and said my cycling buddy is out in the street. He's saying that he's getting faster while I'm inside resting. This stuff runs deep, huh?
Wednesday, June 13, 2007 at 8:32PM 
