holding back

"Come on, what's a little more swimming time?" one of my lane mates said to me this morning. It was the angel on one shoulder and the devil on the other shoulder. I wanted to stay longer than my prescribed 30 minutes, I wanted to so badly it hurt.

I remember the conversations I have had with Jesse. About trusting your coach, and trusting your athlete, the two way street of trust that we take in the coach athlete relationship. I remember him instructing me very explicitly on how there will be times I want to go harder and go longer, but I must trust the plan that we have created. There is a purpose to everything.

There is purpose to a 30 minute swim.

There is a reason I went to Jesse and QT2 Systems. Not to do more, not to do less, but to take the path that come November in Clearwater.... will bring me my best race to date.

I know the frustration that I feel when one of my athletes "goes over time". By an hour. I have a few of them and they know who they are. Then you go back to the drawing board and reconfigure for the next week. I know abut adding time on, I am the queen of it. If you have a good coach you have a progression and a plan. You have to trust it.

Adding time on is almost the guarantee of time spent on the couch nursing an injury when you should be hitting race prep targets. Almost guaranteed.

It's easy to do more work in a sport where it might seem that more is better. If 30 minutes is good than an hour might be better. So you add it on not realizing you may have upset the balance of the scheme that someone worked hours to carefully plot out with you.

It's not getting people to do more or work harder that we have trouble with, it's getting athletes and myself to recover both mentally, physically / nutritionally. I will work myself into such a hole that I crash my bike due to being so far in that hole that I am too tired to pay attention to the road before me. Happened in October. Member that?

Training includes rest, includes recovery, includes nutrition. This is all part of the category of preparation. There are things that fall under preparation and there are things that fall under execution. By not hitting just one of those things in those categories you will affect your outcome.

Preparation today meant swimming 30 minutes. No more, no less. No matter what.

It's definitely tough, when people are hitting the races. When so many of my athletes and friends are hitting peak fitness for their July Ironman races. I am not racing again until July, and my biggest race is in November, in July November is still four months away.

As I told myself this morning, Cait Snow didn't win Ironman Lake Placid by adding this, adding that. She won that race by sticking to her plan. Solidifying the four pillars of performance as they outline in the QT2 plan. She straightened those four pillars and she nailed a race she was prepared to nail.

I bet you any amount of money, that when told to swim 30 minutes, she might not like it, but she does it.