Tough week, good and bad

Whew, what a week.

From a training perspective this was a week with a pretty good load and I had the highs and the lows, but I also ended up with some great lessons learned.

On the high side, I got a great bike ride in on Friday where my coach, my friend Krista, and I all circled Mercer Island. That's a fun ride because once you get onto east Mercer Island Way, it's pretty non-stop for 11 miles or so with no stop lights, no crosswalks, nothing. It's great. It's a bit hilly, nothing serious except for the final hill back to the parking lot when I actually ran out of climbing gears :). But what isn't hilly in Seattle!

This was a fun course that was made even better by riding with good friends that brought me along and really made me feel comfortable. Here's the important thing to me, even though I'm not the strongest, fastest, fittest, or best athlete - these friends and my coach really make me feel that I'm part of the collective and even though I would have understood if they dropped me back, they didn't. On top of which, my coach gave me a lot of awesome tips while she was watching me ride. My cadence needs to come up some, but I'm still learning to shift with the terrain as needed. I actually kept it up for a good chunk of the time. Definitely need to work on smooth shifting on the larger hills when I'm going from the big chain ring to the little one. That's just practice - of which I should be able to get a lot on Mercer Island. I did love the one moment when I was up at about 32 mph ... to be fair, it was a big downhill.

Also on the upside, I recovered nicely from the 408K and I'm pretty good with how that race turned out.

On the personal side, it was an crazy travel week. I came home on Monday, got some biking in on the trainer, then Wednesday I made a day trip down to San Jose. I was schedule for a 3 mile non-stop run. I did actually take running clothes in my laptop bag and went for a run at lunch. I did not get the 3 miles non-stop in. I did, however, cover my first mile non-stop. That's a good milestone. It didn't go to plan after that for a lot of reasons - weather (warmer than I'm used to), fatigue, and just general fitness that still needs to be built.

I was really down in the dumps after I didn't achieve my goal. Thankfully, I have some excellent friends and my coach really picked me up. This was a classic case of me being way too hard on myself and getting wrapped around the axle. I thinking I'm narrowing in on what drives that, but I'll get that in a future post.

I'm better now about my performance on Wednesday, but that was a good bump in the road. Thankfully that bike ride on Friday really made me feel a lot better about how the week went.

And then there was today. I was schedule for a 6.25 mile run, but I had to pull out at mile 3. My ankle just refused to loosen up and allow me to really run with a normal gait. I recognized it as I was coming down through Cowen Park. When I got to the water stop at mile 3, I just made a decision that it was a bad idea to continue (I was encouraged to make that decision as well, but I was headed that way regardless). This was a tipping point in which I could have gone either way; down the road of disappointment or letting it go. This time, I've let it go, at least mostly. Am I disappointed, sure. Am I crushed, no. I never want to give up on a workout, but I'd rather give up on a workout than risk an injury that could keep me out of a race. This was a tough week and my body just didn't have it in me. And that's ok, well mostly ok. I'm still me, after all.

The week isn't over, but I think it's been OK. I think the lessons learned (I'll talk about some of those in the future) will be valuable...