One Week to Trials

Ok, we're officially at one week to trials. Ill be driving out to Oklahoma next Monday with my teammate and housemate Ian Ross. We'll meet up wit the rest of the team (who's mostly flying) once we're out there. I've been tapering pretty seriously for the past week and a half already. I felt aggressively over trained with about 3 weeks to prep for trials. I was tired constantly, I had a high resting heart rate, I dreaded practices, my times had severely gotten worse, and I had lost all my fire. As terrible as I felt at the time, I was happy about it. It was a sign that I had done all I could to prep for the season, and I had hit a wall with just enough time to rest it off and recover for the first big race. All good training comes with highs and lows, and it was time for me to be smart about training and force a high for trials. I'm pretty sure the final kicker was a crazy weights workout I had done the week before. I did 500 reps of bench or bench pull each day with my 30 rep max weight (50kg). It was a crazy couple rainy days of weights that required more recovery time then I had realized.

Anyway, for the past 2 weeks or so I've cut out a lot of extra weights and runs. I now run only to warm up and lift to maintain or pump up the muscles a little before a paddle. A lot of European teams are huge on the pre-paddle weights. They love doing a few quick power sets to get the blood moving before hitting the water. It's a great warm up strategy.

With paddles, we're still doing a lot of pieces per workout: 8-20 pieces of a various distance or amount of time. For example: 10x 300m or 20x 2mins on. These workouts are great for endurance building, but as I began my early taper, I had to focus on building intensity over building endurance. So, in order to make these workouts a bit more intensity-friendly I started doing a lot of "picking my pieces." I would do every other piece of the workout hard with high intensity and in between these, focus more on technique and race plan. I'd stay mentally in the game on all pieces, but alternate steady/hard.

Last week was a pretty rough low-point for me. It's hard to get pumped for practice when you feel tired and weak constantly. I was mentally struggling. But I've heard in rumor that "the days you struggle the most are also the days you improve the most." So that kept me going, as well as the thought that I was beginning my taper and it was all uphill from there.

It's crazy how a few rest days can completely turn you around. The lighter work load from last week had a huge impact on this week. I remember vividly waking up Monday and realizing that my fire was back. I hopped out of bed before the sun came up and knew I was ready to go. I could feel my uphill climb in effect.

This week has been a lot of intensity work. We'll have time trials on Saturday: 1000m, 500m, and 200m. At trials women will only race the 500m and 200m. Thus far my times on Saturday time trials had been slow, but I'm looking forward to seeing where my times are after a solid taper.