So last week was a week. Wasn’t particularly bad, but coming to the end of my first month of training I was feeling some kind of way about my progress and how it was all going. While I’ve been pretty consistent with getting workouts in, I’m not making any real progress, at least not that I can tell. I’m not getting faster, I’m still taking a lot of breaks (mostly for mental reasons, but I haven’t been able to break the habit), and having time constraints on my only real goal for the year is making me nervous. I’ve always felt like 100 miles was a long shot, but BR in particular because it is a challenging course. If there were no time limits, I’d be fine. I have the utmost confidence in my ability to keep moving forward, if time was no object I would absolutely make it. But it IS. And my current road pace would not see me crossing the finish line. So I started freaking out.
After some wheedling I sent a message to my coach. I am TERRIBLE at advocating for myself. AWFUL. It’s one of the hardest things for me to do, for a lot of reasons (all of that is fodder for therapy and perhaps a different blog post on a different day…). And after the message we scheduled a call. Which I was nervous for all day because again, I’m terrible at advocating for myself. It was, in actuality, a very good call. Very productive, and I hung up feeling much better about things. We’re shaking up my training plan in a big, bad way–which both terrifies and excites me. She’s given me some mindset stuff to work on to rebuild my confidence.
I started working with a coach in the first place because I’m not someone who can push myself past certain limits. I get scared–of both failure and success–and I back down. An outside influence telling me to do something–and believing that I can–forces my hand. I’ve realized though that there is a fine line for me when it comes to training. I have to find the balance between working my ass off and not taking it too seriously. If I keep a “goal at all costs” mindset I will not succeed–the universe will pull me back, often just short of the goal. I had a really great season in 2019. Then 2020 happened and I really feel like I lost myself as an athlete. While I still ran consistently, I struggled a lot and I’m far from peak condition. (Another thing that my anxiety blows out of proportion–I’m not in peak race shape, but I’m also not 2 steps from an appointment with Dr. Nowzaraden. This isn’t a couch-to-100-miles journey like my brain makes it out to be.)
So today I have a workout after work that kinda makes me want to puke if I think too hard about it, but also excites me at the same time. And I’m just going to do my absolute best with it. Looking forward to seeing and feeling progress. We’ll see what happens by the end of this month.