The Beauty of a Rest Day

My training plan for Ironman TX is pretty straight forward.  Every week I do four workouts each (12 total) of swim, bike, run.  These are done Tuesday - Sunday with a rest day on each Monday.  See, easy peasy!

That means today was my rest day.  Normally I am antsy and sometimes sneak in an easy spin on the trainer or a short run but not today.  Complete rest!  I even had a 3-hour conference call for work so I was forced to sit in my office chair all afternoon and do nothing - except think - and that is when things get complicated.

It gets complicated because I begin to think about schedules, training plan tweaks, races, nutrition ...yada, yada, yada ....


Some of the things (s/b/r related) I found myself pondering today:

-  I am running a Half Marathon on Sunday.  Totally forgot about this race and never planned for it in my training schedule.  Means I will have to switch around my long ride and long run this weekend. Not a big deal. Then the question is how hard should I run the race?  Push the pace and race a 1:35ish or hold back and do a 1:45-1:50 run?  If I go hard will the longer recovery needed hurt next week's training?  Whatever happened to the days when I just went and raced and didn't care about all this other crap? 

-  Also realized I am doing a 70.3 in a mere 89 days.  All the questions listed above are sure to resurface in about 85 days.

-  Found out on Friday I have a work event that will have me traveling five weeks before Ironman.  It is a convention so this means I will be standing on my feet all day long the entire week.  These conventions are utterly exhausting and in the past my feet have been destroyed at the end.  It is in San Antonio so I can drive and am considering bringing the bike and trainer and stinking up a Marriott room.  This weekend is supposed to be a 6 hour ride too. I cannot miss a 6-hour ride.  Luckily, I will be back on Saturday night so I can get the ride in on Sunday morning but that means the scheduled 3-hour run is going to have been done in Downtown San Antonio extremely early on Saturday morning.  Good times!

- I've never been one to obsess over minor details and really just have always rolled with the punches but for some reason this little 140.6 race has me obsessing over the smallest things?  Is this normal or have I developed OCD?

- I CANNOT WAIT for Saturday at 4:30est!!!  Ravens at Steelers III!!!  This is my type of football - violent and fast.  These teams hate each other and this is going to be the game of the year.  Unfortunately, they will probably beat the shit out of one another so bad that whoever wins (Pittsburgh) will be too banged up to beat New England the following week (yes, I pretty much disregarded the Jets right there).

- I watched "The Cape" last night.  The only reason is because really nothing else was on and I was not tired at all.  My expectations for this show were very low.  Even with this preconceived notion I was still disappointed - it was awful.  The acting, story, special effects and the acting (said this twice on purpose) just utterly sucked balls.  It was so bad that I actually felt bad for the NBC people who paid to have this show produced.  They probably all had pink slips waiting for them this morning!

Got a 4am wake up call tomorrow morning for Master's swim.  Back to training and back to not worrying about all the small stuff -  To hell with you Rest Days!

Thanks for Reading,

Jeff