Squash

You know those days when even though you manage to get out of bed to do your workout, you find yourself looking at the trainer saying to yourself, “I don’t know if I can do this”? Walking down the stairs at the house this morning I could feel the effects of yesterday’s run. I found the 8 minute warm up on the Chris Carmichael DVD to be more difficult than it should. The easy chain ring was only allowing me to churn out 80 RPMs this morning. The first set of intervals was 5 sets of 30 seconds on and 30 seconds off, followed by 4, 3, and 2 sets. I was able to complete these, but was not able to enjoy the effects of the recovery. It never seemed to get “easy”. After a 5 minute full recovery, the next set of intervals was 5 sets of 2:00 max effort and 2:00 recovery. During the first set I found myself having to dig deep and find that extra bit of strength that comes from the core. I wasn’t sure that I could keep it up. After the second set, I started looking at the time and allowing myself to reason that this has been a good workout and that if I were to stop, it would be justified. But I continued. Despite having my eyes roll back into my head and my total lack of being able to disguise on my face the pain I was in, I was able to finish all five sets without giving in to the temptation to take it easy. It’s days like this when you don’t feel like you can keep it up or that you have every excuse in the world to call it a day that you can draw upon during the race and know you can dig a little deeper and persevere. I may not have been able to produce elite level watts this morning, but I put a huge deposit in the training bank that will pay dividends down the road.