Week One The First (AKA "Pre-Training")

Motivation: What carried me through this first, shakedown week was the excitement of officially registering for the race. It's real now. I love new beginnings and the idea that I have a clean slate. I got completely psyched inputting the plan and getting all organized. It's that back-to-school kind of feeling. Each workout was new; there was no pressure to do it all exactly right coming out of the starting gate. It was great! Our "real" training plan begins on March 31st but since we wanted to go ahead and get started we figured we should do the first weeks of the plan in a dress rehearsal sort of way - to work out any problems. There weren't any problems.

Tri-Tool/Gear Gratitude Focus: This week I am most grateful for my Training Plan! (<--I started to write TP the way I do in my notes but realized it might give someone the wrong impression so I went back and laboriously typed all those letters. Luckily my blog has ever so much more room than my paper calendar.) Anyhoo... I may have mentioned that I love training plans. My partner Donna would much rather have loose guidelines or parameters within which to do her own thing. Me? I need structure. I need to have a way to feel I'm doing it "right". I need a way to measure my achievement. I need to know what to do and when to do it. I also need to have a way to know when to stop. The training plan does that for me. If I didn't have a training plan, I wouldn't know when I was done. That may sound bizarre because I think a lot, if not most people have an inner sense of "that's good, that's enough" but I don't. I don't know if I messed up my internal regulators by being bulimic or if I was bulimic in part because I didn't have that internal measure to begin with - but it's the same for training as it is for eating. I've learned that I have to rely on external gauges and I have to be careful in choosing ahead of time what those gauges are going to be in order to stay healthy. I'd love to have a coach to work with - someone who'd develop a plan just for me - but holy hannah that's expensive! Until some kind soul gives me a suitcase full of 50's - I'm going to stick with the plans in Gale Bernhardt's (totally affordable) book Triathlon Training Basics. Unfit beginner? She knows me so well.

Obstacle of the Week: This week I was sure that my biggest obstacle would be logistics or the weather but it was the babble in my head that I had to overcome. I was ridiculously jazzed and my inside voice could not shut up. Or let me sleep for more than an hour at a time. Yada, yada, yada, so excited, blah, blah, can't believe, blah, what if, blah, and blah! Who knew happiness was so loud? And annoying?

Setting My Sights For The Upcoming Week: Get more sleep. Breathe. Strap in. This is where the new wears off, but that doesn't mean it has to suck. I can do this.

Celebration: Well done! A full week logged! The switch flipped from "I'm fixing to get ready to get started" to "Holy crap, here we go!" Oh - and I blogged about it. I rock. Oh, yes I do.