When nothing seems to help, I go and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it, but all that had gone before.
Jacob Riis
Training in the Time of Cholera Corona
The last couple of months training has been a total drag and revisiting Jacob Riis’ quote has provided solace and motivation. Due to COVID-19 and its impact on the ability to spend time outside and around other people, training, work,life has been thrown for a serious loop and it has been very difficult staying motivated to do invest in…anything. Not only because of the anxieties of being outside but also because of the changes to race calendar.
My plan for 2020 was as follows:
- Celebrate my birthday by returning to Eagleman 70.3 in mid-June
- Return to Cambridge in September for IRONMAN Maryland
What 2020 is actually looking like:
I kid, I kid… sort of. My current schedule for races is:
- Eagleman 70.3 in September
- That’s it
- No seriously…
- Nothing else
Eagleman was postponed to September for the same day as IRONMAN Maryland and I am not comfortable with my first IM being my first race of the season so I deferred IMMD until 2021. I would be lying if I said it wasn’t disappointing and disheartening.
Motivation and Visualisation
I remember my first training runs back in 2018 and picturing what the chute at the end of a full IRONMAN would look like…imagining what it would sound like to hear the MC say my name followed by “you are an IRONMAN!”. Having experienced a 70.3 and the life-altering and intoxicating feeling of finishing that race, I thought that training for the full would be easier, but if anything, it’s been harder.
I took a stab at a post months ago and it started like this:
We are so accustomed to cheering for the athlete at the finish line that we forget to cheer for ourselves for getting to the starting line. It takes courage to keep chipping away at smaller goals, smaller choices made in everyday life, without knowing if it will be enough when all is said and done. Courage to give the best effort that you can muster, knowing that no one will see until you cross that finish line.
Past-me sure seemed to know I was going to need a pep-talk months later. It’s hard comparing ourselves to the future. I don’t know who I will be at the starting line of my first IRONMAN, but I know that I will have earned it. I just need to get back to focusing on the laps, miles, and strides that make up the path connecting the present and the future and stop worrying about the finish line.