Things I Hated About the Training Season
1. Having my dishwasher look like this every single time I ran it
Seriously, people, when your dishwasher looks like an ad for the Plastics Advisory Board, there is something wrong. Every week we were the people who lived out of sports bottles. Crikey.
2. Slugs
EWWWWW. Look at it. All slimy and ooky and long. I know, I know, I’m supposed to be one of those outdoorsy people who loves everything about nature. But let me tell you, there is nothing quite as unpleasant as having something land with a large SPLAT on your leg and looking down, hoping to find a big piece of wet mulch or something that’s been kicked up by your bike tire, only to find PART OF a SLUG slowly dying on your kneecap.
This is gross. This is the epitome of gross. And I think it is highly unlikely that any of you would have done anything other than what I did, which was to burst out into hysterical tears and swipe, panicked, at the offending piece of sludge (because that’s what it was by then), and then, not being able to remove it, swerve in all sorts of curlicues all over the bike path, endangering the lives of yourself and everyone around you, including your boyfriend, who is riding near you but suddenly doesn’t want to ride anywhere near you.
Sigh. This happened to me twice. Yes, yes, with the exact same results (swerving, crying, swiping). Yuck.
3. Laundry
This is the way our laundry pile made me feel every single week. It was shockingly huge. And smelly.
4. Not being able to do this:
We definitely overdid our training this year. We just assumed that we wouldn’t be able to the off-road stuff we really enjoyed, and so we cut out mountain biking and trail running, and just stuck to the on-road stuff, making it very easy for us to fall into training ennuie. We won’t do that again the next time we do an Ironman. Of course, then Isabella, the lovely steed I’m riding above, got stolen from our basement, so I’ll have to find another way to ride during this mountain biking season.
5. Also not being able to do this:
and this:
Yes, yes, indulgent eating and drinking. My body chemistry definitely changed. It was like, I couldn’t eat a ton of really rich food or drink a lot. The latter is obvious. But the former…I never expected it. I always figured, the more calories, the better. And you can’t argue that surf ‘n’turf is pretty high-quality. But I’ll never forget the following day’s workout, either. So, so awful. Sluggy and everything. [Ew, slugs. There they are again!]
But now I can have a couple of glasses of wine and not feel like a turd. I can eat what I want to.
6. Cooking. I love to cook. I remember wishing I had the time to do it more often. Now, I do.
Things I Loved About the Training Season
1. Efficiency. Jim and I became uber-efficient over the peak season of training. There was very little wasted time. If there was extra time, it became recovery time.
2. Feeling fit. Yesterday I walked a mile. Granted, White Plains is kind of hilly (in fact, it’s nothing like the plains we have in and about Chicago), but seriously, why did I wake up this morning with cramped and cranky hamstrings?
In all, I think that the things I loved outweigh the things I hated…if only because being efficient and feeling fit are things I want to run as constant threads through my entire life. That thing about the slug? Yeah, not so much.
