Time for a Break

Believe it or not, I'm taking a much-needed break from training. Since NothingMan, my body, and to some extent, my mind, has been telling me to keep it light. There have been days when I've wanted to run and my legs have felt dead. Same deal with biking. At this point, I'm not obsessing over whether it's as much mental as physical.

I've been sleeping a lot, puttering around the house trying to decide on things I can give away or throw away and not much else. I am keeping up stretching, and I am lifting, because, well, I never seem to tire of that.

Since I'm barely training, I'm watching my diet like a hawk, since I don't want to gain weight. At the end of a season, I always banish all the treats from my house that I allowed myself to have (in moderation, of course) when I was in heavy training--candy, Twinkies, various chips and such. At first, as is pretty normal, I craved all these things and just wanted to eat a bunch of food. But that is subsiding, and it's good to be comfortable on a very modest diet.

I figure I can continue on like this for at least another month. It's not like I don't want to do any exercise--I'm going to work my way back up to running 5x per week--but waking up early to swim is now optional, and trying to push myself hard while running or biking (that is, if I manage to get on a bike) is optional.

In a way, I'm looking forward to winter, as I generally do. There won't be any reason for me to train too hard, there will be no yard work to do (except for moving snow around), and I have lots of time for reading and other indoor activities. Right now, though, I'm still finding my way through a period of letting myself wind down physically and mentally. I laugh at myself periodically how worked up I get over training and racing! Not that that's a bad thing, and not that I won't get worked up again next year! It's just about time that I took a much needed break from running myself into the ground physically and neglecting anything not strictly necessary for or related to triathlon.

So if you don't see me posting here too much, well, that's why. I'm still contemplating whether it's necessary to write a season wrap-up or not--I think this next year for me is going to be about mixing things up--not so much training but just doing stuff, having fun, and letting races be stops along the way.