Week 9 HITS 140.6 Training: It Didn’t Happen

I want to say that I probably have a blog title of that sort at least once or twice a season. They come up unexpectedly, generally because of some sort of shenanigans in my life. This time, it wasn’t purely shenanigans — my boyfriend and I (of almost three years) split up. Thus, I spent the entire week off from training, aside from Friday morning team training.

On Saturday, I decided to clear my head and drive on over to Rattlesnake Ledge for a short hike. Something about being out in nature was mentally cleansing.

Once I got to the top, I wrote a few pages in my journal and spent my time soaking up the sun and the air. It was a beautiful day out. Hiking up and down the hill, I felt a great sense of release from a lot of the stress I had been bottling up, and for the first time in a long time, I truly felt happy again. Like, 13-mile long run happy, or killer open water swim happy. For the first time in awhile, I felt at complete peace. It goes back to my theory about reincarnation — a soul can die a thousand deaths but you can be reborn a thousand and one times. I’ve been able to lean on the support of many, many friends (more than I apparently thought I had) during this difficult time, and I am very excited about what my future holds. I’m looking forward to going on holiday at the end of this week. I look forward to planning a few excursions by the time the year is over. I’m looking forward to traveling abroad next spring. This is going to be great.

So, regardless of whether or not I got the training in, I’ll keep moving forward. At this point I am 70.3 ready but it has always been the half-to-full training scale that has been historically difficult for me to maintain. Now that an emotional weight has been lifted from me, I feel like I can fly. That was worth having the week off. I have exactly two months to get from 70.3 to 140.6 ready. I’ve done a 2.4 mile pool swim before. I’ve done a full marathon. All I need to conquer is the century ride (and then some). Depending on the weather this may all be on the trainer, but I think I have enough bike handling skills for the flat terrain I’ll be facing at HITS Palm Springs. I just really need to learn how to clip in/out when I’m not on the trainer! (That is looooong overdue.)

Relentless forward progress.