Charting my own path

Weight: 211.7 pounds

Workouts: Sporadic and unstructured for the past two weeks

The fact that this blog post comes two full weeks after my last one points out the challenge (futility) of my triathlon attempt.  Everything I read (and there’s lots of it) tells me I need to be able to do 6-10 workout sessions per week, and I’m just going to run out of time.

My favorite training plan for a first triathlon seems to imply that I should be working out three times per week in each discipline, and then find time to do my strength training, stretching, yoga, and likely get a massage pretty regularly.  That may be okay in the early days, when some of those workouts are only 20-30 minutes long, but later in the cycle, each one of those workouts would take an hour, and some take 2-3 hours, like my long runs and long cycles. 

I wish I had that kind of time.  I know that some would say I can scrape it together by not doing some of the ‘non-valuable’ time that I’m spending, but my personal reality is that I leave for work by 7:15 a.m. each morning, and I don’t get home until 7:30 – 8:00 at night.  My morning workouts have been getting cut short already, unless I’m up by 5:00 each morning, and that would require me to get to bed by 9:30 each night.  I wouldn’t have time for an evening workout and the ability to see my family (except for 3-4:00 on alternate Saturdays, I suppose).

So my training isn’t going to go according to schedule.  It’s not going to be as rigorous as I would like, or as any training plan implies it needs to be.  It’s going to be my training plan, full of my constraints, my priorities, my capabilities, and it’s going to result in my outcomes. 

Realistically, that actually means I might come in last. Dead Freaking Last.  I might be the one getting pity claps as I cross the finish line, or worse, as I haul my butt off the course, unable to finish.  Barring accident, if I get to the starting line, I should be able to finish within the (very generous) time cutoff, but if the training doesn’t get done at all, I will be risking injury on the course, and that would sideline me for more than just the race. 

That will tell me one of two things.  Either I’m physically incapable (which, if true, I should discover long before the actual race day) or psychological incapable, because I won’t make the sacrifices required to finish.  That’s not the same as having a psychological problem, it’s just the decisions I’m making to balance the needs of work, family, and other responsibilities.   

For the next two months, I hope I can master that delicate balance.