Friday Tri: Going Slower

This year one of the main things I have changed in my training is more slower running and biking. When I say slow, I really mean slow. This is one of those things that I heard people talk about for years and I just didn't believe. I was sure that the way to get faster was to push myself hard every day. I would do puke inducing workouts on a regular basis, often every other day. And sometimes, if I could figure out how to do it, I would push myself in different sports every day.

Then I hit 40. As Lois McMaster Bujold says of Miles Vorkosigan, 40 hit back (only for him it's 30). And I started to dread workouts and not be able to sleep because I was thinking about the next day's workout. And I wondered what it was I thought I was doing. I am not a professional athlete. I do not want to be a professional athlete. I am a professional writer and I can see pretty clearly what happens when you turn your hobby into a career. I do not want to do that to my triathlon training.

So I gave up writing down goals last year for each race. I gave up doing a formal list of things that I had done badly at each race and wanted to improve on. I gave up the list of yearly things I wanted to achieve in triathlon. And I gave up writing workout plans for myself. I woke up every morning and made it up. I did what I felt like doing instead of what was written on a plan. And I felt like doing what was a lot of slow stuff. I like working out. I like the adrenaline and endorphins that I get. But I get those without pushing so hard.

Slow is a relative term, by the way. It means what feels slow for you. For me, that means my heart rate is generally below 130 on the bike and below 140 on the run. For swimming, it often means that I use fins, which feels like cheating, but makes swimming enough easier that I can keep going for an hour without resting or having that queasy, dizzy feeling I sometimes get that possibly means I am dehydrated in the water. For you it may mean walking. Or running on a treadmill instead of outside. Or leaving your watch at home. Or having a friend with you at a workout who is slower than you are. It may mean setting goals to be slower rather than faster and rewarding yourself for them.

Sometimes I will do a whole week of easy workouts after I've finished a race. I've done a lot of racing this summer, with three races in August alone. I have tried to save my racing for the races. I like racing. I am aware of the fact that having other athletes around makes me want to work harder. I think this has an effect, though of course there are times when no amount of wishing that I could speed up to catch someone is going to matter. But I keep dropping time off my PR's, so I am going to assume that at my age, I must be doing something really successful if I am still getting faster rather than slower.

I tell other athletes over 40 (who ask my advice) that one workout a week that makes you sore or makes you so tired you need extra sleep is plenty. More than that is probably too much. I'm not saying you shouldn't be trying to workout harder. But once a week plus racing is enough of that for me.

I should also make it clear that even though I do not write down a workout plan formally for myself anymore, I have been doing this for long enough that when I have a race coming up, I have a good idea of what workouts I absolutely have to do to be able to finish the race. And I do a lot of long distance stuff, sometimes spending three or fours hours working out on a Saturday. I'm not trying to give people permission to get up and do the same workout they've always done forever. The body makes adjustments and you get less and less out of the same workout over time. But what works for me is more of the longer, slow stuff that builds a great aerobic base.

Being an athlete doesn't mean going out and pushing myself past all limits every day. It means listening to my body and being a good coach to myself. It means knowing that I need to rest, building in a day a week when I do nothing but walking, if that. It means spending some time congratulating myself on my successes, celebrating little things in a formal way, looking back and seeing the progress that I made this year as compared with last.

But as I write that list, I realize that the lessons about going slow and listening to myself are not just lessons about triathlon, right? As a writer, I have learned some of those same lessons. It doesn't help for me to just force myself to keep writing when I am stuck on a novel. Feeling like I want to puke on my own book means that there is something wrong. It may take a lot of time to figure out what that something is. It may take doing things that don't feel like they are going to make me break through, like reading or watching TV or lying down and doing nothing at all. And one of the things that is important to feeling happy about my writing is celebrating my successes and congratulating myself. I try to keep up good self-talk about my writing because I am the only one in my head, and I better be nice to myself there. No one else can do that for me, and that's a vital space to keep happy or no writing is going to be good.

By the same toke, I think these are healthy tips for anyone, writer, athlete, mom, student, human. We spend so much time making lists of things we want to achieve. We spend less time waking up, trying to decide how we feel, and then allowing ourselves to do what we can within those limitations. Slow and steady wins the race, right? Be a turtle. And remember, the turtle wins because the turtle takes care of herself. The turtle doesn't need the breaks the hare takes because the turtle isn't pushing that hard all the time.