Firstly I guess I should follow up on my last post concerning the swimming which wasn’t going so well at the time. Well thankfully almost the next day I think it was, things clicked back into place in the pool. I started to re-focus back on what I had been doing for the previous few months – both in terms of session structure and actual swim technique. Whilst it wasn’t an instant return to form and speed in the water, it did pretty quickly ‘feel’ better and more like it used to. The Friday swims weren’t fantastic in terms of the times I was hitting, but they were better and mentally it felt good and I knew that the feel for my swimming was returning. Within a couple of days I was back hitting the times I should be and starting to improve on them as I’d hope to. As I write this entry into my blog, my confidence in the water has returned and I’m enjoying getting wet once again. Its so much easier to face 7.5k (300 lengths) in the pool, as I did yesterday, when I can tell its making me stronger and faster, and I’m not feeling like I’m fighting it all the way. Yesterday I did a session with Julie Dibens, Mary-Beth, Rinnie (Marinda Caffrea) and Joe (Gambles) – Most of whom are either current or former World or European Champs of some kind. We swam a set that I’d NEVER have been able to do before and the times I was managing to hit were HUGE PB’s for me. It nearly killed me and the ride in the afternoon was tough due to this, but it was well worth it and another example of why training here in Boulder is so great. To be pushed by this calibre of athlete (i.e. the worlds best) is impossible to over-value. Hopefully I’ll remember this last couple of weeks next time I feel a plateaux in my training and need to be patient again
But back to this post then…. though in some ways still following on from the pool work.
Here's a little picky from a ride the other day. Gorgeous, but hazy day... those mountains in the distace are HUGE. We rode up over 8000ft on saturday. the air up there is REALLY thin and i was breathing SO hard just trying to get to the top of one of the climbs
When you’re training day in, day out and your livelihood depends upon how well you do, how fast you are, how far you can go – when the clock, times, splits, distances, speeds etc all become your “monthly review”, if you let it, it can leave you in good places or bad places. Mentally I mean, at least.
Because getting faster, fitter, stronger, lighter are all targets and the clock, the power meter, the scales DON’T lie, you can easily be faced day in day out with feedback that tells you exactly where you’re at. Many triathletes and I’m sure other athletes too, can get bogged down in this and let it really get to them. I’m sure people in various other types of jobs feel this pressure too – a teacher with SATS results for example. Recently I’ve had both ends of the stick but have noticed how I (people in general?) respond to the different ends of the spectrum. I touched on the negative a little last time, but on the positive I’ve noticed that actually, instead of receiving good results for what they are and tell me, I can be prone to doubting… even when it’s something as solid and unquestionable as a time. Swimmers will all tell you “the clock doesn’t lie”…. So why if it tells us something good, do we then doubt its ‘honesty’?
For example, I sometimes ride using power as a gauge for my performance in training. It’s measured in Watts and just like the clock, doesn’t lie. One second is the same as the next, and one watt is the same as another one. On Sunday I did a certain ride, with a particular goal in mind for the ride of the number of watts I wanted to produce. I did this, felt good and happily held the wattage I wanted to – both an improvement on last year and also a BIG difference to when I first arrived at altitude. Instead of trusting the results, I found myself questioning its truth. That’s kind of like looking at a clock and questioning if one minute was slightly slower that the one before. On Monday I did a run, again with a certain target speed in mind. I ran it, timed it and thanks to GoogleMaps measured the distance. When I worked out the pace and it was exactly as fast as I wanted it to be…. I still doubted that I had actually done it. Even in the pool, where things have been going great, I still constantly want to prove to myself that I CAN swim a certain time per 100m because as soon as I do actually DO it, I still doubt that it was real and question that I can do it again.
It’s an obsession that I guess drives me on to keep trying to prove to myself how things are going, if I’m improving etc. Not a bad thing on the face of it, but I think it’s important to celebrate and receive them (at least internally) when goals and targets ARE actually reached, instead of belittling them and casting doubt over them. Otherwise this can prevent confidence from growing, which is really important.
Faith plays a massive part in my life and who I am; and faith and doubt don’t sit well together. There’s a great verse in the Bible in Hebrews where it says “What is faith? It is the confident assurance that what we hope for is going to happen. It is the evidence of things we cannot yet see.” I think this is so important to remember when we do actually achieve something we’ve hoped for (and often worked HARD for and believed will happen). When we allow this to happen, it grows faith and shrinks doubt and this allows us to hope for, work towards and ultimately achieve even greater things.
What I feed will grow, so I’ve been trying to feed the confidence in recent results so that it will grow instead of the doubt.
