One of Those Days!

I Have been involved in endurance sports for many years. If the starting point was when I took up running at age 15 - that's nearly 35 years of these stuff. If you do this stuff long enough, you know that you have good days and not so good days.

Over the weekend I had "One of Those Days" - and not the good variety of these days. I was supposed to be doing an 80K road race on Sunday morning, but I woke up and felt really rough. It was to be a two hour drive to the race site, then a 2+ hour race then a 2 hour ride home - all-in, about seven hours of my Sunday was to be taken up with this race. Not sure why I felt terrible, as I had, had a fairly light week of riding in the past week. I decided to not go to the race, initially with regrets, and instead go out for a 2 hour ride on my own. Within 1/2 km of starting the ride, I knew that I had made the right decision. My legs felt dreadful and completely lacking of any fitness and strength. My regrets turned to a feeling of making a wise decision.

I was having the type of day that, you dread ever lines up with a race-day or a day with a really hard workout planned. I have had them over the years - fortunately, they have infrequently lined up with race days, but I am sure some of my really ugly performances over the years, have been because - it was One of Those Days.

The two hour ride was done well off my normal pace for this route, and as I came up towards the end of it, it was feeling more like the rap-up to a ride twice as long and as hard. Over the years, I have become fairly adept at predicting these low ebbs and making good choices as to whether to race or not, or postpone that really hard workout for another day when I can go really hard. Not sure what it is that leads to these days. I know that if you fastidiously track, morning heart rate, body weight, diet, key workout details, total watts used per-work etc . . . you should be able to track and predict these days. These days, I can predict them by feel, and yesterday I know that I made the right choice!

Your mileage may vary!

Picture at the top is from the end of the road at Chain of Craters Road in Volcano National Park, Hawaii, where recent lava flows have blocked the road.