inauspicio.us

A child of five would understand this. Send someone to fetch a child of five.

It is taper time again, far too soon after just a few days of solid training.  Maybe this post will help remind me that I’m not invincible after races even though I feel like I am, and that I am invincible before races even though I feel like I’m not.

This morning, five days out from my longest race in over a year and less than fifty hours removed from life best swim, bike, and run performances, I’m nursing a psychosomatic head cold.  Which is to say I feel like death, but only when I think about racing on Sunday.  I will get past it.  That said, it does suck and I hate it.  You spend all this time dealing with and preparing for the physical challenges that race day will bring, and even some time preparing for the mental challenges that race day will bring.  But who prepares for the mental challenges that taper brings?  Should training even include that, or is that giving too much credence to something that’s “just in your head”?  Fortunately I’ll probably never know.

I am still learning to embrace, or at least accept, the physical pain of training.  Not the “oh god, my legs hurt, wish I could slow down” pain but the more or less constant ache, slightly lightheaded foggy feeling of never really being at your best.  The full-body throbbing when you’re lying down, the fact that it takes upwards of an hour into a workout to start feeling good.  These are all warning signs – “You are near the edge” – and I understand that they are to be cautiously embraced.

One day I will have taught myself not to worry about things I cannot control.  I practice, maybe not more than everybody else, but as much and as carefully as I can.  I know there is no such thing as 100% prepared, and that “as ready as I’ll ever be” is an unidentifiable state.  But the mental difficulty, the uncertainty, is still a huge issue for me though.  I worry about not performing up to my capability, not being aware of my limits, making a stupid pacing mistake, making a stupid eating mistake, and making a really stupid equipment mistake.

And I’ve gotten a lot better at dealing with these uncertainties in training.  I’ve gotten through any number of tough workouts in the past few months simply by knowing I could do them.  If I stopped to think about why, I’d have no reason.  No data to back up my belief, nothing that you could say would indicate a breakthrough – and I know better than to stop and think about why.  There is no why, there’s only this belief and confidence.  I don’t know where it comes from or how to summon it, so on days when it isn’t there I’m shit out of luck.

Ah well.  Taper is a beautiful thing, isn’t it?