The night before jitters have hit hard in the past hour or so. The high temps and humidity brought my training down to a somewhat pathetic level. I feel like I peaked too early in the season and have been on an endless downward spiral ever since the Century and Flyer race. On a more optimistic note, there's still a part of me that is excited and wants to hit that bike course with all I have to see what I'm capable of. Mostly I'm nervous because I want to improve upon last year and feel I should after the many improvements in training this year. I feel like we've had some good advice and I want to show that it made a difference.
This year the race could be a lot harder based on the heat alone. Normally my goal would be to break an hour on the bike, but if it's at all windy or hot I just want to finish feeling I gave it all I could. It's a especially inspiring year as over the past week there have been a steady stream of Olympic Athletes breaking world records and inspiring me to find that competitive spark inside myself and do better than I think I can.
There's been a lot of sacrifice to get to this point, time spent away from anyone who doesn't train with me, eating dinner at 10:00 just to get in a late night workout, swimming at 5:30AM, or 8:30PM, running in 90 degree heat, riding my bike for 2, 3, 6.5 hours, sucking down nasty energy gels, that one hill work out we did, bricks, running- biking or swimming when all I wanted to do is sit down in front of the TV, having a smoothie instead of anything else, dragging the bike everywhere with me, breaking in new shoes, sprinting laps in the pool, riding in the rain, and in my opinion the worst... running on treadmills. The thing is for some reason it's all worth it once you cross the finish line and can take pride in the fact that you challenged yourself, not only on race day, but all year long to be better than you thought you could be, and even though you might not finish first you showed up and finished. All those crazy hours spent getting to that point and the sacrifices you made are nothing compared to how much you've enriched your life by participating. Even though I'm nervous and the swim still triggers butterflies the size of parrots in my stomach, I know that even if I grab a kayak, get a flat or have to walk during the run I will be happy that I got that far... we've had a lot of fun tri-ing.
I'll report back tomorrow!
Listening to: Home/ Dierks Bentley
