Resetting and rebuilding

What the F! I spent all this time training, travelled far and wide to find terrain, and climate suitable for preparing myself for what was (possibly) one of the signature moments of my life, the long course, and now... What's going on?

A multitude of things occurred throughout your day or days leading up to the race, and for wahtever reason you day ranged from a glorious demonstration of how proper training/preparation/nautural ability to the worst you've felt for an entire day and finding fault with having paid for the opportuinity to hav e done so.

It's possible to fall at both ends of the spectrum at the same time and several places within throughout the experience.

I probably wasn't there for your day (sorry about that), but I wanted to say that I'm proud of you. Too much can be made of a finishing time. Time is a relative mark in our human abilty for understanding the world. It matters not in the slightest to the satisfaction to committing to a distance and pushing through the discomfort that is a race. You may have set a time to finish by or a total time to complete the race in, but it was made in a vaccum. It came from a perfect world of controllable training sessions and the rosy lenses of the best case scenario. On race day all that gets chucked out the window and you rely on everything that you can squeeze from your body on that one day. Be proud of what you've accomplished. I'm proud of you.

But now what?

Long course race preparation requires an amount of sacrifice that sane people don't really inderstand. You've done that. You have given what was possible and some that wasn't. Your body needs rest, but more than that your mind deserves rest. It's been your brain that saw the date on the calendar and pushed your body towards it. It was your mind that held everything together at the peak of training.

Take now to reconnect with your life. Sleep! Call or see people you had to push to the side. Sleep! Make good on your promise to your boss or life partner to do that thing you said you'd do right after ironman. Sleep!

Try not to think about the next race or event. When you're ready your brain will know where to fong your running shoes.

I've been off for a little more than 90 days, it's my biggest true layoff from training in close to five years. In that time I've been going to concerts at the hollywood bowl, worked on my relationship with the greatest woman to have ever come in to my life, retaken up cooking for fun, and enjoyed long walks with a golden retriever puppy.

Life is yours to live. The next thing will come. For now rest, handle the chaos that comes from a new span of free time in your life that resembles the loss of a part time job. Remember what you used to do with that time, and think about whether or not to reintroduce those things in to your life again.

Every second counts and they are yours for you to do with them what makes you happy.

Here for you as always.
-irondean