Anyway, without trying to valiantly fill you in on the ups and downs of my last, oh, SEVEN weeks of training, I will say that all in all I feel like things have turned a bit of a positive corner since I last wrote, and even when we received a recent "race-day-is-ten-weeks-away" e-mail, I haven't been feeling quite so panicky or behind the curve as I was there for awhile. Which is interesting, because just a few days ago I had my very first
TRIATHLON ANXIETY DREAM!!!
I mean, I knew they were coming - I've known that since my running shoes first hit the icy pavement. Because, even from that far-off vantage point of Week One of my training program, I knew myself well enough to understand that no matter how ready I am to perform come race day, this event (just the very existence of it) will jangle at least one, if not a few, of my very sensitive and highly attuned nerves. And, when my nerves get jangled, I have dreams. Anxious ones. Ones in which I am trying and trying to get all my hair tucked into my bathing cap, but just cannot get the job done, no matter what I do.
It's really telling to me that this recent dream was about the swimming portion of the race, because although technically the dream took place in the pool where I train on Monday nights (and so wasn't exactly about the actual triathlon day itself), I thought I was pretty clear from the start on the fact that the swimming portion of this event was going to be, by far, the easiest and least stressful of the three sections. Hmmm. I guess that might not be so. I think that even if you look at my previous few posts you can see that it's safe to say that the swimming has in fact NOT been the least difficult for me, but perhaps actually the MOST. I've been swimming for so long - swimming and swimming as if I was, in fact, born swimming - that there seemed to be nothing much there for me to fear, and also not as much to improve on. Here's what I had been thinking, going in:
I knew my running would have to take some serious leaps and bounds, being that starting out I could only sweat out about 10 minutes before feeling like my lungs were going to explode - a pure "beginner", you could say. (I'm up to over an hour, now, by the way, and clocking in almost 5.5 miles at a go). The biking I had gauged to be my "intermediate" event, in the sense that the training wheels have certainly been off for long enough to make me a proficient biker, though not one to take on long distances. And so the swim - the swim! - would, in my pre-training brain, fill the space of my "advanced" level activity, and as such I didn't seek out an extra place to swim each week (I figured once a week would be enough to get me into tip-top shape), or worry too much about it.
And yet I've been finding that these weekly sessions in the pool are the ones that get me the most nerved up, and the ones that I most desperately (see two entries up) look to avoid. I haven't actually skipped that many sessions, which I am proud of, but I am still interested in the fact that even up to this past week's session I had to have a minor battle in my head right before leaving for the swim in which I egged myself into going mostly by reminding myself of the yummy dinner of lentils and tofu that would be awaiting me upon my return.
Once I'm in the pool, things are ok - I don't perform poorly, and I don't ever feel like I physically need to stop. The drills we do are challenging to me, though, and because we are swimming in a pretty small pool and with lots of us crammed into one lane, when I am feeling slow or need to really take my time on one of the exercises we're doing, I know that I do feel pressured to speed up and stay with the pace of the group I am with, which isn't so productive for me. We recently were introduced to a technique called the two-beat kick, and it's something I actually found to be really helpful because it relaxes me and slows my stroke down so that I am doing less work with my arms on each length that I complete. However, last week the coach watched me doing it, and he said that I'm not timing my arms with my kick correctly, and thus am not getting the most efficiency out of the stroke. As you can guess, I wasn't thrilled to hear this, and I spent a good deal of the rest of the session obsessing about the timing. I still felt good, the whole time, which I think is also a testament to how much my overall fitness level is improving, but damn, I want to get that two-beat kick down!
So, as you can see, the dream is not so much of a surprise. But, as I tucked my hair into my cap with absolutely no troubles this past Monday, I reminded myself that the learning is in the doing, and that no matter what kind of jangles are in there and need to be worked out about this swimming stuff, now is the best time. You know, now - before I'm plunged into the Hudson with hundreds of other swimmers, hanging on to a rope so as not to be dragged away by the current before the starting gun, and trying for the life of me not to accidentally swim to Jersey! Land ho!
That's all for now,
Katie
