Sunday, October 11, 2009

Dark Places

There sometimes comes a moment in long endurance training where you feel like utter crap. Your body is telling you to quit, but you know you have to keep going. Usually it is deep in the session when you still have a long way to go and you are in pain and running out of energy.

I started out my 91 mile ride feeling good. I knew I had to ride hard for six hours, but I blocked that out of my mind. My plan was to ride the ironman route all the way up then do shorter loops so that I went up the hill three times. Again it was windy like last week, but the wind was more out of the east and a little lighter, so it wasn't as bad. It got worse as the day went on and I was still fighting it riding downhill.

By the time I hit mile 60, my feet hurt, my rear end hurt, my neck was still and my thighs were burning. I would stare down at the road in a trace trying not to think about how boring the road was, how tired I was or how many miles I had to go. My goal was to keep up a certain pace, but I was fighting to maintain it. By the time I was ascending the hill a third time, my mind was going to dark places. I told myself it's like a race-the good feelings and the bad feelings don't last long.

I recently was reading a book by Eckhart Tolle entitled "The Power of Now". He says that the "pain being" tries to assert itself over your spiritual side, which means that unhappy thoughts in your mind try to keep you from feeling at peace. Instead of living in the moment you are thinking negative thoughts. This "pain being" took over my mind because I was so physically uncomfortable. I felt like I had to resist it because it was going to visit again sometime in the race and I had to be ready for it.

As a defense, I finally told myself about mile 74 that I was going to fight the urge to slow down. I made a game of trying to maintain my average speed for every mile until I reached my goal. It distracted me somewhat and the fact that I was nearly home helped. I made my speed goal for the whole 91 miles.

I think getting through an ironman race is about pain tolerance through mental fortitude. The mental fortitude you get from yourself and from the people that support you. The mental fortitude you get from getting through a tough training session. The mental fortitude to keep going when you body is screaming for you to stop. Mind over matter so that you can defeat your demons.

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