Mind and Body: Lessons Learned

Nearly every long workout offers lessons, and I’ve had some good ones over the past few days.

I’m consistently surprised by how much our minds can f*ck with us. Mine is an expert at causing trouble. It routinely tries to convince me that I can’t do something and therefore shouldn’t attempt it. It can even create phantom physical symptoms. I have been known to suddenly develop a “sore” shoulder before a swim that I didn’t feel like doing.

But what I want to talk about here is Friday’s run. It was long, and I was feeling nervous. Last week’s stupidity with those Instagram exercises was a reminder that the wheels can come off this little project at any moment.

But that usually only happens when you do something you’re not prepared for—which is why I have a coach. My build has been gradual and very conservative. Anything that’s in my schedule is something I’m trained to do.

So, when I texted her the night before the run with sudden knee niggles, she intuited it as head games and said, “Go anyway. I think you’ll be fine.”

And I was. It was just my head saying, you’re not ready, you can’t, you shouldn’t. But I was ready, I could, and I did.

This is not to say we should ignore the voice in our head all the time. But we need to develop a sense for when it’s telling us something useful and when it’s messing with us and should be ignored. That’s not always easy. I had some serious hesitations as I laced up my shoes that morning. Is this the day everything goes to shit?

Thankfully, it wasn’t.

Ironman is all about questioning our self-imposed limits, which is one of the many reasons I love it. It takes those limits and crushes them. It challenges us to do things that seem impossible but are absolutely doable when we take them one step at a time.

We can do more than we think. I have to remind myself of that nearly every day.

Now, onto body lessons which came in the form of another workout: the long ride.

A few years ago, I invested in a bike computer which opened up a whole world of riding—since I am an expert at getting lost and normally wouldn’t go places that I don’t know. So, I’ve been shaking up my long rides by trying new routes in unfamiliar places. This has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantages: it’s more fun. The rides become adventures. Instead of thinking about the distance, I’m seeing new things and not incidentally making sure I’m going the right way.

I love my bike tech but I do not fully trust it. Batteries run out. GPS gets confused. I always write out the turn-by-turn directions on a couple of index cards and bring them with me. It takes a bit of time, but I have never, not once, regretted doing it. Occasionally, Garmin likes to throw in random make a U-turn messages. Sometimes it’s clear that I’ve taken a wrong turn. But at least twice yesterday, the U-turn messages were totally wrong, and my index cards saved me from riding around in circles like a clown trying to figure out which way to go.

There is one big disadvantage, however, to riding in an unfamiliar area: you don’t know where to find water and bathrooms. Of course, I checked on the map before leaving and marked places along the way where I was fairly certain there would be both water and a bathroom. I made sure there weren’t too many miles between these places so I wouldn’t get stuck without either. And that was it, I was good to go.

Turns out, fairly certain isn’t certain enough.

First of all, I wildly overestimated the capacity of my bladder. Thank goodness it was early in the morning when that happened—no traffic, lots of bushes, no shame.

But more significantly, I was very wrong about the availability of water. This was a seven-hour ride, and while the first few hours were relatively cool, the temperature soon soared to 33 degrees. I filled up my bottles once but had marked a spot for the next fill that was WAY too far away given the demands of the weather. I found myself out of water in the middle of nowhere. All there was around me was farmland. No parks, no gas stations or coffee shops—nothing.

Pretty soon my legs started slowing down and I began wondering what I was going to do. I finally reached a park—the place I’d marked as a fairly certain bathroom/water source—only to find… an outhouse. In other words: no water.

I stopped to ask a group of people if they knew where to find water. They didn’t. But one of them must have sensed my distress because he offered me a cold can of Seven Up. It was the only thing that saw me through to Fort Langley where I could fill up my water bottles. Without it, I probably would have had to knock on a stranger’s door.

Because of the lack of water, I also couldn’t douse my head. Seven hours in the sun is a lot, and there was almost no shade on the route I’d chosen.

However, lessons learned from previous rides: I had left my car at a shady park and brought both food and water for post-ride. These things were lifesavers. After the ride, I lay on the grass for a while, ate a muffin and drank some water, and then hoovered down two A&W chicken burgers on the drive home.

I’m fairly certain that’s the last time I’ll make that mistake. But there will be new ones, of that I’m sure.