Resting - the hardest part of the training cycle

There are Saturday mornings when I am out on my bike and I can smell breakfast cooking in people's houses. I don't even like bacon, but the aroma of it as it cooks often makes me wish I could pull into the random stranger's driveway and ask if I can join them. My breakfast most likely would've been scarfed down in the pre-dawn light, not so much for the taste of it but just for its nutrient contents. Those are the mornings when sometimes I think it might be nice not to train every morning and to just spend some time as one of the regular people who just sleep in on Saturdays and eat breakfast in their pajamas. Well, ever since October 10th, I have been resting. I have been one of the regular people.

I spent most of the first week of it in Hawaii so I got to experience the vacation like most people might. Wake up, eat breakfast, proceed to the pool or the beach. Take a break only for further meals. So that first week definitely wasn't so hard to deal with. Now I'm home. I guess I could go to the beach, but I'd have to wear a lot more clothes. I'm bored out of my mind. I have been working on writing coaching plans and I find myself jealous of the training I'm writing. It seems so strange to basically be getting out of shape on purpose. Eating whatever I want also hasn't been nearly as much fun as I thought it would be. I mean, you want to eat the stuff when you're burning 4000 calories a day and always hungry. I am currently burning less calories than your typical librarian and that doesn't really leave me ravenous. Also, most of this stuff isn't nearly as good as I remember. The exceptions being cereal and double stuft Oreos, which might actually be better than I remember.

Next season seems both painfully far away and incredibly close. I am in the middle of week 3 of no training at all, to be followed up by 2 laughably light weeks before the real training begins again. I want it to start again, but I'm also afraid of how it's going to feel. On Monday I have my follow-up x-ray to make sure that my stress fracture has healed. At that point it will have been 7 weeks since I last ran, not counting that brief jaunt down the driveway that painfully prompted the second x-ray that confirmed the injury. Since I started running nearly 9 years ago I have never stopped for this long. Last year I made it to 5 weeks with my sacroilliac injury, and that seemed like an eternity. I remember how hard it was to start again, I remember still running for another 3 weeks after that before the pain finally went away, and the speed still hasn't returned. Adding a few more weeks to that doesn't really seem like it would help matters any. But there's not a lot I can do about that right now.

However, aside from the pain of getting back into shape at the beginning, I am also looking forward to next season quite possibly more than I have ever looked forward to any season. Assuming the stress fracture causes me no further issues and I can avoid any new ones, things are all moving in the right direction. Without having to waste so much mental energy on dropping a ridiculous amount of weight, I can actually focus more on the training itself, so maybe more improvements can be made. I get another shot at the Ironman sooner than I otherwise might have since I will be doing Ironman Utah on May 1st. I get to go back to California 70.3 in March, which is also one of my favorite races. I get to actually target and race Timberman again, which is undoubtedly my favorite race anywhere. I get to start coaching athletes through QT2.

I recently read something that said, "If money was no object and you could do anything you wanted, what would it be?" I think I'd actually be doing exactly what I'm doing right now. I just might do it in nicer clothes and maybe a car that was a bit less than 8 years old. In spite of the setbacks, things are moving in exactly the direction I want them to. That's a good feeling. It'd be even better if I got to train at least a little!