Up Goes the Gate...But Not My Breakfast

I’m not a fan of mysticism…but if I was I’d be tempted to say all the stars were aligned that day. It was the St. Patrick’s Day 5 Miler, and my coach said to use the race as the Run Test. In the last post I recounted my experiences with the Swim and Bike tests last week – all-out efforts geared to benchmark current fitness level, and pinpoint my maximum and average heart rates to establish the proper training zones for different workouts.

So many things came together for the race:

- I was topped up with great sleep – 9+ quality hours every night all week!
- The day was overcast, breezy, and a crisp 40F – perfect temps to run in
- I was familiar with the course, knew all its hills and turns
- I was sporting new Adidas Adistar Cushions – real Cadillac shoes!
- 14,000 other runners to make it exciting
- I had a PHAT playlist on my iPod, hugely motivating tunes

But the biggest part was that I’d been reading my coach’s blog all week. She and her husband were out in Arizona training with their coach, Spencer Smith, who is a professional triathlete and makes a darn good living at it. Day after day she posted a recap of the training they had completed. One day they rode up Mt. Lemmon and to hear her tell it, it was a lungbusting and legshredding climb up followed by a mind-numbing descent at 30+ mph; and then they ran a “short” 50-minute tempo run. Another day found her riding so hard that she yarked up her dinner from the night before. Amazingly she “hung with the boys” and everyone reading her blog that week was no doubt profoundly affected in some way. To use her famous words, she “suffered like a dog.” :)

In short, I was grateful for her brutal honesty and transparency, but more so her unyielding determination to rule her body with her mind and push the envelope despite being outmatched with the men at times. In January at a triathlon camp I attended, I had a candid reckoning with my self-confidence and had to painfully concede there were more mental demons about this sport lurking in my head than I wanted to admit.

The last 2 months I’ve worked hard to come to terms with what holds me back. Big surprise – it’s my brain! :) Sure there are the required workouts and training to build ability, but I have sorely underestimated the role of the mind when it comes to pushing the limits.

And I proved it during Saturday’s race when the gun went off. Steve and I had run 1.5 miles to the Start as a warmup, and I used the first mile of the race as a “ramp up” for the test. Right after Mile 1, I hit the lap button on my heart rate monitor, and as Steve said, I was “gone.” It was an all-out, max-heart-rate, work-til-you-puke kind of effort til the end.

My legs felt like they had springs in them and my heart rate was already near 180. One of my favorite tunes, Break Me Down by Red, popped up on my player, and I was reveling in the music and picking off other runners. It felt GOOD to pass a LOT of people. Another peek at my monitor 5 minutes later – 188bpm – holy cow! – and I was showing no signs of slowing down. My leg turnover was FAST – each foot was spending as little time on the ground as possible; its only role was to take off so the other foot could land, as if the road was a runway (which in literal terms I guess it is!). Sure it hurt, but my brain was saying c’mon where’s da line? You got more – show me da money!, which to me meant pushing over 190bpm.

I saw the last major hill of the course and thought yeah, this is it. By now I’m 25 minutes into the test, and my legs and lungs were screaming at me, but there was no turning back. I could do anything for 5 more minutes.

Up the hill I flew and for a second I thought man, I might puke – what do I have left in my stomach…hope nothing liquid, that would be gross and I might slip in it…hey, Jen suffered like a dog, so can you! You think it’s NOT supposed to hurt?!

I distinctly heard my mind say exactly what Steve must’ve heard ad nauseum during Marine Corps Boot Camp…Let’s go ladies – MAKE IT RAIN! (Hilarious thing to say to a bunch of MEN in an elite branch of the military…) :)

I crested the hill and saw 194bpm on my monitor – AWESOME. I nearly cried. The rest of the course was downhill and flat; I could hold onto 185-188bpm for a little while longer.

It truly is about the mind ruling the body and today I found out how to take it one step further. There will be other days of aggravation but not today.

Today the gate barring my best performance went up…but at least my breakfast stayed down :).