Exhausted…
September is typically the month where training volume and intensity are both at their highest for ice speedskaters. Once October arrives the racing season begins, and the focus shifts to refining speed.
Here it is, September 1st, and for the first time in a long time, I could not finish a workout. After quite a few fast laps, the spirit and the body both had crumbled by the time the final set came around.
I stepped off the ice too tired to even be disgusted with myself.
There are always 1000 reasons not to do something, countless easy ways to give up & squashify oneself onto the couch. But that one overpowering drive to accomplish something vs. yourself must be stronger.
I always say to my wife that the time to prove that you truly love someone is when it’s really hard, when both people are less than their best.
Maybe if I truly love this sport, this is one of those moments when I need to prove it… How does that song go?
You gotta work like a soul inspired until the battle of the day is won.
You may be sick and tired, but you be a man, my son.
Will you remember the famous men who have to fall and then to rise again,
So take a deep breath, pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start all over again.
1 hour from now workout #2 starts..
GAME ON!!!!
Filed under: from the coffee shop
Ah Yes Andrew,
A “Just Do It” moment.
Keep working toward your short term goals….September will soon pass, along with MUCH Lactate…
Enjoy the pain my friend…
Here’s something I can tell you but don’t have the sense to tell myself… Finishing a workout just to finish it even when you’re too tired doesn’t show more love or dedication than recognizing when you’re not doing it well and getting off the ice if you have to. Of course you have to train hard, but you can also decide to just do the NEXT workout even better.
OK, OK, here’s what I emailed and said I would put in a comment: I wish I could train hard enough to get that tired! Yesterday I was joking with Dave and Olu and said, fake-innocently, “oh, are our legs supposed to burn?” See what Dave has to deal with?!
you are burnt out and washed up if you don’t rest. Now go slower this year than last or rest?
Andrew is “Overreaching” now and is suppost to be tired by design. When it’s time to take more rest in his Periodization plan, he will be Faster than last season
Can’t wait to see what Andrew does in December
I hope I will be faster in December! thanks Pete!
and what Pete says is true, right now is the hardest part of the year-long periodized plan, and there are a lot of tired bodies on the ice right now.. I am far from the only one who feels this way…
Annon’s fairly brutish comment might be correct if I had 4-5 workouts in a row I could not finish.
But after good food choices yesterday, and 11 hours of coma-like sleep, I was pretty strong this morning…
This is the part of training where a well examined training journal becomes ESSENTIAL, (I can also look at my own blog for training data, oddly enough, I was a similar point of tired on august 21st of last year)
Carla’s comment might sound arrogant to someone who does not know her, but she is a unique kind of endurance athlete, and also she has wrestled with severely low blood-iron levels the past 2 years (anemia), and that prevents her from going as hard as she wants to… (her huge aerobic engine lacks good sparkplugs, essentially)…
The fact that she skates as fast as she does, and has won marathon ice national championships (skating as fast as the best of the men!) while dragging that health issue along like a cinder block, is pretty amazing…
Hmm, yeah, Andrew, I understood your post to mean you were tired in a perfectly normal way in one workout in a hard part of your program. And I guess I shouldn’t comment in a way that only people who know me personally can “get”. Translation for anybody who didn’t: Good job, Andrew, don’t be disgusted with yourself. I admire someone who can work with that much focus and get really tired doing exactly the right thing. I also wish we could train all year as if it were the summer but still race and perform well. That is why I have a coach (who has to listen to irrelevant silly statements that in one way or another relate to how I don’t like rest).
My legs actually don’t burn while I’m moving (so they do during static base position but not in a race) I felt bad about that for a while because I thought maybe I was not trying hard enough, but that is just my physiology. And I joke around a lot. At one of the workouts in the spring, I was in an irritated mood because someone had just tried to run into my car at a gas station. We were talking about how the end of a 1500 feels like some drill we were doing that involved burning legs for everyone, and I said, “wait, that’s really what a 1500 feels like?” and then made fun of myself for the next 48 hours about the way that sounds. Seriously, I think humor is helpful in workouts because sometimes it keeps us from getting frustrated too easily.
Regarding my iron, it is still low, but I feel ok…but I think I’m also kind of used to it. Usually I feel fine, but when I try to add just a little bit of speed, things don’t cooperate. That doesn’t change the fact that I still need to work on good technique and high quality training.
Maybe the Rusko test will help determine if your body or mind is telling you something.
See http://www.skifaster.net/article.asp?DocumentID=26
Yes the Rusko test is all great for endurance athletes but speedskating is not an endurance sport. Esp for andrew who is fast because of his fast start. Your morning HR doesn’t tell you anything about your muscles. There are 4-5 spots between Kip, Tucker, Shani, Chad, Needham, and Donald.
as one who once listened to your advice on the importance of rest, may I offer a gem I picked up from a book by Greg Lemond:
“if you feel good and your intervals are strong, go on and do 7 or 10. If not, get off the bike and rest for the rest of the day.”
while being tired at a certain point in the season is one thing, being overtired on any given DAY is another; not to mention the higher risks of injury, lowered immune resistance, and a barrage of other drawbacks to training too much. Do only what needs to be done to actually be productive, and not set up for ruin on the next day’s workout…and your spirits will surely raise if you are better able to perform next time.
The problem isn’t when you can’t finish a workout from time to time, the problem is when you can’t start one.
It takes a big skater to have the discipline and wisdom to know when to stay on the ice, and when to step off of it.
If you DON’T have this feeling a few times each fall, you’re doing something wrong. Remember, after all the sport-science, all the fancy testing and bells and whistles, speed skate training really comes down to a simple principle; You train hard for a while, you rest, then you go fast. I got that sage advice from a smart man a long time ago…and it works.
please please please send me some photos of me skating on the long track ice here in slc.
i; love, andrew
o; mikkelsen, jannicke