Heavy Medals
When working with clients that have packed race schedules, I often ask what are the tent pole races in their season. Many times the answer is, “all of them.” If you only have two or three races in your calendar spaced out in opposite ends of the year, then yes, it is possible to hone in and crush those events. But if you have a packed calendar with races happening every other weekend, it’s unrealistic and improbable to PR all of them. Trying to stay on top of your training week in and week out is not only draining on your mental, but will catch up on your body and leave you susceptible to overtraining which will lead to greater risk of injury. Much like a car, if you keep revving the engine high and pushing it hard around the streets day in and day out, you’re going to cause damage and it’s going to end up in the shop. For you, you’re leaving yourself open to injury from pulling muscles, straining ligaments and more.
Mentally, keeping your head in the game with a heavy, strict training program to work on earning those personal records while maintaining a health family life, keeping up with your work career and leaving room to just enjoy life is really tough to balance out. Keeping this heavy workload will start to manifest itself in how you sleep, your irritability around others, chronic fatigue and essentially lead you to not enjoying something that should be fun and exciting to do. Not only will you suffer with the mental drain of overtraining, but those around you will have to deal with the funk you’ll be in from it. Many of us rely on the support system that our family and friends provide with partaking in our crazy hobbies. But if they see that your hobby leads to so much physical and mental strain on you, why would they want to continue to support you in something that isn’t bringing joy for you?
If you’re like me, you love racing! I love the process, discipline and challenge that training for an event brings. For me, I find myself willing to give that extra push when I have an end goal in sight. I know there’s finality in the training cycle which means I’ll be in a place to put in some downtime to recover, enjoy some extra noms and be refreshed to start it all over again once I cross the finish line. Typically, I have about six to eight races a year that are split with three or four of them in the spring and another three or four of them in the fall. That cycle of the seasons is great to have built in automatically within the year to allow that downtime to happen. But even with those blocks of races, there is typically only one that I’m really looking to excel in. The other races I’ll use as testing grounds to see how training is going or simply to have fun in and keep a race streak going. But again, having one or two races to really keep the focus on allows the body to push hard without breaking and keeping yourself mentally fresh each time, consistently.
While living in Covid still very much pertinent in all our lives, it’s foreseeable that races will continue to be done virtually or outright be canceled for the rest of the year. And so while it may seem out of place to talk about racing right at this moment, I’m still very much hopeful that traditional racing will come back sometime next year. And when that does happen, it’ll be super important to adhere to these principals of spreading out your race calendar and training smart so that you’re not getting injured in your first month back to racing. Remember, if testing your mettle and collecting metal along the way is your thing, you’ll want to have your race calendar spread out evenly to allow for your body to recover in between races.
