I did that open water swim test. nailed it. got my confidence back. good to go.

I followed that with a 20k run on Saturday. didn’t push it too hard, but I ended up setting a 15k run PR. Amazing.

That’s where the good news end. That run really messed up my knee. I now know what I already knew. I have about 20k of running on that knee before the pain gets serious. And that’s without 7h on the bike before it.

Sunday, I went out for a 4h ride. I did 3h18 minutes. My legs were toast. I could have done 1h more without too much of an issue, but I decided to cut it short. In my defense, there were road closures that really messed up my rhythm, there was traffic on one of the climbs, I did climb 800m… It wasn’t too bad.

Today was a big day of failure. I went to the pool in the morning. I wasn’t feeling particularly crushed or anything. I just went into the water and called quits at 500. It was so casual. my heart is just not in it at all. I decided that I needed to rest today.

In the evening, I rearranged my training schedule for the week in light of an open water session that I booked for tomorrow. I decided to go run. I felt good about it, I had some energy, my heart was in it, I wanted to put in the work. I went out, ran for a few minutes, but the knee was too bad. Like it felt I’m actively trying to tear it apart. I shut the session down.

I didn’t want to quit. I fired up the ol’ trainer, put an easy session in. Called it quits less than 10 minutes in.

3 failures in the same day. I have no excuses. I just really need to say that I had every intention of having a great run. I felt like I would have totally pushed the pace and gotten a solid workout. But the knee…

So I guess that’s a good excuse. But what about the pool this morning? couldn’t I just do at least 1500? what about the bike? couldn’t I do 45 minutes easy?

I feel like this shit is getting away from me. It’s not about training anymore. It’s about the first reason we started this. to follow through, to the end, across the finish line. To start strong and we finish strong.

Clearly, what happened is that I’m cooked. I always think like I’ve gotten much better at feeling the state of my body and it’s perhaps true. But I’m shit at gaging how I’m feeling psychologically. a savage run on Saturday (after more than 3 weeks of not running properly) followed by 3h on the bike on Sunday with 800m of climbing… I was certainly due a rest day. But I fucked it up by piling on.

Clearly, I didn’t learn to allocate my effort. The successes that I’ve had so far came from an early lesson I learned which was about the value of systems and routines. Since I moved to Lisbon 2 months ago, those went out the fucking window. Getting sick, then falling. My schedule meant nothing anymore and I’m scrambling without it, alternating between overtraining and misguided recovery.

I also hosted a couple of friends last week. Very poor timing. That was a mistake. but was I really supposed to live in isolation for another month? Could I? What sort of poor decisions would that have lead to?

So… About that class I booked for tomorrow… is that a good idea? Should I go? Should I bail? If I go, they will certainly kick my ass like last time. Am I tired? Or am I just being a little bitch? What’s good for me here? These are the questions that I got rid of by following the plan. Now that that’s out of the window, I still lack the proper calibration to make these decisions for myself and the time to adjust.

So it looks like this is going to be about grit and determination. That’s a bad situation. Perhaps I can find a middle ground. Maybe It’s best to do the session tomorrow. That’s in a group so it will force me to be present and push. Maybe I take a day off after that. And then I’ll see what I can do about the rest of the week.

I just rearrange the week accordingly. 7 hours planned on the bike. That’s what it’s gonna take to maintain my fitness. that’s what the crash cost me. I think I really deserve a little bit more slack here. Adjusting to training without running is difficult. Most of the training I did so far was, indeed, running. It’s my safe space, my fallback. I think I deserve a little bit more slack.