Training starts to feel like (actual) training again. I train some acceptable amounts of hours and also some intensity again and am finally getting the feeling of “accomplishing” something in my everyday training again. A feeling I was missing for quite some months now. However, it has been more than 8 months and I wish that I already would be in a future state where racing would feel like racing again. Instead, I am only making slowly progress. The right direction but not the right speed.
My training volume is heavily based on cycling right now. Luckily, I enjoy cycling a lot and currently it is also simply way more fun than running because I can more easily regulate/play with intensities there and see way more from my surroundings on a 4h ride than on a 2h run. Since April my running speed has roughly dropped from ~6:20/k to ~5:30/k which is certainly progress but obviously there is still a good way to go.
Previously, I already wrote that I feel like I am dealing with the whole situation mentally better than I would have imagined. At the same time, it is a constant up and down and WOC the last days did not help. I really tried to avoid it to a good degree, only shortly checking the final results some time after the races finished. I knew that this situation will come when I ‘canceled’ my season back in February but knowing that did not help too much. It is almost impossible to properly distance yourself mentally from such a season highlight when sprint is the main focus of your career and you haven’t been even trying (or been able to try) to get there.
I love following sports and reading about athletes stories, so I directly bought the latest issue about the German athletes preparing for the Olympics this year (german only). Great read but it resulted in a rollercoaster of thoughts about unachieved goals/dreams of my own and on the other side the desire to continue fighting my back to racing again in orienteering. Note to myself: I could have timed the reading not to correlate directly with WOC..
And yes, right now I am heavily leaning on trying to fight my way back. I know it will still take time and lots of mental energy. On the other hand I can’t deny that I never felt so detached from orienteering which itself feels strange and basically wrong towards my goals. I time to time deeply miss the international orienteering circus, the traveling, orienteering racing and meeting people I usually see every couple months because of the sport. I recently wrote in a monthly status update within the national team that I currently could not imagine anything better than reliving the Worldcup last year in Czech Republic. My performances there were far from good but my memories of that time were great regardless, and currently there are simply no new memories added to the collection which would prevent me getting nostalgic.
Coming to my health, based on all my tests the current suggestion is that nothing is wrong with my body health-wise, including my heart, and I apparently just have managed to get my body into a very (very, very) untrained state. While I am not really convinced by that (for example why does it take me so long to get back to my previous levels?), there is not much I can do or still test. Additionally, am I slowly improving so I am trying to accept this “diagnosis” which is easier on some day than others but I only might fully accept or forget about it when I feel like I can perform normally again.
This post’s tone could have been swinging either way depending on the day, and I guess today’s version got a bit more depressive than I anticipated or desired it to be (I collected notes on that post the past ~two weeks already). I can say regardless of it all that I enjoy the summer by training in the sun and eating watermelon, it’s just everything else around it which is missing a bit. I am certain that I haven’t lost my drive and motivation yet so I will keep fighting.
Slowly but heading in the right direction, good enough (for now).
PS: I know that I need to get better again at aligning each story block in a post.
All other photos (incl. title) are from holidays in May in Lugano, Switzerland.
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