Since there are lots of people I havent gotten to speak with yet since my race at the ITU World Championships I will give a quick synopsis of what happened. An astute observer may have seen my result and thought it appeared a little slow for my standards, and you would be correct! It was about 6 minutes slower than my best time, but the course was a few minutes slower than most so I feel comfortable saying it was probably really only 2-3 minutes slower than my previous best would have been on that course. But for the work and improvements I put in this year I expected to be quite a bit faster than my previous best (at least 3-4 minutes) as my swim and run were both significantly improved. Unfortunately in the last couple months leading up to the race my race performances began declining and I was feeling pretty fatigued most of the time. I took quite a bit of extra rest over the last month and hoped it was enough, but it didnt work. Actually I felt more tired if anything despite doing a fraction of the amount of workouts. When the race finally came around I started out great, comfortably moving to the front of the swim and settling in the draft of another solid swimmer, but just as I reached the point of the swim where I normally start to find my groove and settle into the pace I wanted hold for the majority of the swim, my energy levels abruptly dropped. I went from feeling strong to having nothing in the tank in a matter of seconds. The rest of the swim was a struggle, then I had to fight to keep myself moving through transition. The bike ride was actually pretty good, I took longer than normal to settle in but I enjoyed it was satisfied with that ride under the circumstances. Then the run was a complete disaster. I simply had nothing to give. I went from a goal of holding about 6:00/mile to a goal of not stopping to walk within the first half mile. The entire run felt like that, the unexpected result was that I was actually able to enjoy the run since there was no pressure anymore. I am normally desperately trying to hold onto a lead on the run (and that was the plan today), so it was nice not having to worry about who was about to pass me (since there was nothing I could do about it). I really enjoyed the race honestly, it was probably my favorite olympic distance race course yet, but the result was pretty disappointing. Reflecting on the performance afterwards and scratching my head to figure out what went wrong, I came to the obvious conclusion that I really should have seen a long time ago, I was suffering from overtraining syndrome. An overview of it can be seen here (rice.edu/~jenky/sports/overtraining.html). Basically what it means is that I haven’t had enough rest for the amount of work I put in. All the work finally caught up to me and my body won’t allow me to keep working at a high level (or any level for that matter) right now until I get quite a bit of rest. The funny thing is that I designed my training plan for the season specifically to avoid this problem, ensuring that I had plenty of rest days each week and a rest week of reduced workload every fourth week. The problem came in when I didnt sleep enough to allow recovery from the workouts so rest days and weeks were pretty much wasted. Between my work schedule (4am-4pm) and having a family that I wanted to spend time with I didn’t have a lot of time to sleep, often getting 4 hours sleep or less for days at a time. Compounding matters was the fact that my sleep was frequently interrupted by a 2 year old girl who has a bad habit of waking up in the middle of the night screaming bloody murder. Put the hard work together with minimal sleep and I dug myself pretty deep into a hole of fatigue and am now paying the price. After a week of doing nothing I still can’t do any workouts, and when I try to exert myself I get fatigued very quickly. Fortunately I had already planned to take a few weeks off after this race, now it may be a little longer than that. Either way, I am going to enjoy it! I love working out and will miss going for a nice ride or run, but there is never a dull moment with a 2 year old in the house. After a few months I will start doing a little bit again, but some valuable lessons were learned here and I plan to start next season more intelligently (as the pre-race fortune cookie suggested) and make sleep a vital part of my workout program. Overall it was a great experience and I enjoyed my time in Canada. Ellie managed two great races and came home a World Champion!!! On top of that she certainly improved a lot in her olympic distance race, adjusting for the slower course this race was probably about 2-3 minutes better than her previous best! I couldnt be more proud of her:) Thanks for all the support from my friends and family, I definitely felt loved!
Posted on: Mon, 08 Sep 2014 21:49:10 +0000
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