Journey to Kona Day 146: Knowing When its Time to Rest

I know that I've blogged about this before, but it's really not something that I'm very good at.  I also don't really know how to rest.  I considered last week to be a week where I "rested."  That was purely meant to be physical rest, although I've already put in nearly 10 hours of physical activity this week (a good portion of it walking, I'll grant that, but activity nevertheless).  However, my two day trip to Baltimore involved over twelve hours on airplanes, squeezed into an uncomfortable seat, and much of that time was spent mentally engaged in catching up with some projects.  Mental activity is also not rest, as my wife often reminds me.  I generally have trouble resting mentally, as well as physically.  Wednesday was spent babysitting a 3 1/2 year old.  Enough said.  Thursday was a pretty intense workout day.  I "warmed up" for my swim lesson with nearly 3000 yards of solid swim training, then had my 45 minute swim lesson, then spent the next 3 hours getting my bike fit dialed in.  Friday ended up including nearly 2 hours of walking.  No wonder I really didn't feel like doing anything yesterday.  Oh yeah, I stayed up until 2:30 am in order to see my daughter's improv show.  Despite not wanting to get out of bed yesterday, I did, and did a 2 hour run in the heat of the day.  My wife an I then spent a good portion of the afternoon picking out a kitchen sink faucet, and looking at flagstone for our yard.  More brain damage.   So, today was supposed to be a cycling day.

I went to bed last night around 9:00 pm.  I woke up a few times and fell back to sleep.  Finally, I woke up around 6:30 am.  I felt like staying in bed, so I did!  I actually fell back to sleep and repeated this a couple of times until I finally "woke up" at 9:00 am.  That seems like rest!  No physical training for me today.  I think that my body and even my mind have been telling me this all week, and I haven't found a way to truly listen.  So, I'm listening.

The human body and mind is remarkable.  It's often hard to listen to the signals that our own body sends us.  I tend to pride myself on listening to my body, especially when I'm training.  In fact, on race day, that's one of my strengths.  I'm usually good at following my body's signals and modulating my effort effectively throughout the day.  When it comes to training, I'm certainly not one to take it easy or take a day off just because I'm lazy.  Quite the opposite.  One of the best things that ever did was switch away from having my coach write up daily workouts, because I knew that I'd follow them to the letter, whether or not I should!  In a lot of ways, this has allowed my to transform my training at 60 years of age.  I didn't do much training last year, but I was working my butt off.  This year, I'm not working my butt off, so I've been able to up my training.  Finding the balance will always be key. And so, today, I rest.