Saturday, January 18, 2014

Accidental hiatus and trying to regain focus

It's been quite a while since I posted.  And primarily it's been because I haven't had much to post about.  The truth of the matter is that I haven't been training consistently since last summer for a variety of reasons.  Nevertheless I got picked up again by Triathlon Canada to represent our country at the ITU World Triathlon Grand Final (Olympic distance) being held in Edmonton, AB, Canada (not a glamorous venue, but it does mean a ton of my family can come).  I'm also again getting fantastic support from Sugoi Performance Apparel (www.sugoi.com)

So why am I not training like my usual self?  The truth is that it's been a lot tougher than I thought trying to balance family, work, and Triathlon when you have a young family.  It takes a toll on your motivation to train when you constantly miss workouts for a variety of legit reasons.

Training effectively requires a very structured approach.  When the rest of your life is unstructured right now, it's hard to follow a structured training regime.  My workouts right now tend to need to fit into whatever time magically appears in my schedule and wherever (geographically) I happen to be at that time.  For example, let's say I have a bike and swim workout scheduled on a particular day but the only time that opens up is during the lunch hour and I'm no where near my bike or a pool.  Well, pretty much that day is a write-off if I'm following a structured training approach.  So I finish the day a bit disheartened and without the endorphin kick I get from training.  Multiply that by x number of days over y number of weeks and you can understand why someone who is extremely structured by habit can find themselves frustrated and demotivated.  Especially when you have hired a coach.

So clearly a normal child-free, stable work commitments, regular schedule kind of approach won't work for me anymore.  What now?  I'm looking for suggestions on what to try, but here's my current plan.

- Make sure I always have the right gear in my car in case an opportunity for a workout presents itself
- Start running and biking more with Eli in the Chariot
- Sunday morning swims with Eli will be treated as kick sets where I push him around on the foam rafts (which he loves)
- Treat the regimented day by day schedule as a list for the week rather than for the day.  Move around workouts as required but following good training principles (e.g. don't do two hard breakthrough workouts consecutively)
- Be more proud of the training I can do and less frustrated by what I cannot.

--IronDad