Monday, February 20, 2012

Going Forward

I am starting to reach those long training workouts that go with Ironman training, the workouts that begin to stretch my weekly training hours well beyond anything I would normally do. So far everything seems to be going well for me. In a way, things almost seem too good as I am coming off off two good training weeks in a row (and those followed a good 50 mile running experience in the Rocky Raccoon 50 mile event).

I don't really have much to report on, other than perhaps providing a detailed description of last week's workouts which I don't plan to do this year--although I did have close to 13:40 of total workout time last week. Feel free to go back into last year's blog posts if you want to see a weekly blow by blow of my training. However, it will vary from this year given that I entered this point of training from a perspective of being in better shape and aiming at some additional priorities along the way.

One thing I did want to write about was a change in my perspective. This is something I have mentioned a few times before, and my perspective is something that continues to evolve in ways I do not necessarily realize until after it has changed. I realized last week that all my training for so very long a time period has been backward-looking. By that I mean that I was attempting to reach a point of fitness that I could compare to a previous point in my life when I was in better shape. Later on I shifted to a backward-looking perspective where I was fearful of returning to my more recent past of less healthy habits and regaining the weight I worked so hard to lose. It is only fairly recently that I began to shift my perspective to being forward-looking as I concentrated more on what I can accomplish for its own sake with no bearing on anything in my past (except maybe to be better, faster and stronger than I was before). I don't quite know when this change of perspective happened, just that it did. Everything in my training is now geared towards improving myself to be better, but without the ghosts from my past taunting me along the way and also without me making any comparisons to my former self.

89 days until Ironman Texas.....

3 comments:

Amanda said...

I am so glad to hear you say that you're looking forward. You don't need to compare yourself to your younger self or anything else. You are amazing as you are!

Glad to hear that training is going well.

Adrienne Langelier, MA said...

It seems that the more we look forward, the less we look back...pretty cool, huh?!

Have a great 89 days and then some!

K said...

Relentless Forward Progress! You are amazing!