When Mind Cannot Conquer Matter!

And so week 15 of the build up began on the back of the half marathon and at first glance it seemed a little meaty! All up I swam 14km, cycled 284km and ran 55km.

The 'lowlight' of the week was a 40km bike timetrial that appeared on my programme scheduled for Wednesday. My strategy for the start of the week was to therefore munch my way through the easier sessions to try and recover the legs enough from the half marathon to come to the party and produce a decent timetrial result. By Tuesday however I was beginning to have a crisis of confidence - I'd set out on an easy run and my legs were cramping on the downhills and sluggish on the uphills. I put in a quick call to the coach and I was given the 'it's time to front up talk'.

Now I've never needed any encouragement to 'front up' for a timetrial at any other time so the mere fact I had picked up the phone was a little unusual in itself and unsettling. I had a niggling feeling that something was not right and that I didn't feel good but I ignored it - put it back in it's box and proceeded to spend the next 24 hours amping myself up! It's at times like these that you fill your head with quotes such as 'just do it' 'impossible is nothing' 'mind over matter' and so forth! You tell yourself that you are invincible, super human almost! Perhaps that should have been the first alarm bell to can the timetrial the second might have been the 2 hours I spent creating a playlist of 'go get em' music on my ipod or thirdly the fact I felt the need to fill up on as much carbohydrate as I could get my hands on prior to my timetrial date! Either way on reflection it would seem that I was frantically trying to align the stars when the stars just wanted to be wonky!

Now I'm not entirely sure what my thought process was around the start of the timetrial - for some reason I slammed my gear into one of the biggest I had and pushed the pedals over like a crazy thing - perhaps the 24 hours of motivational slogans took over, perhaps I did indeed believe I was superhuman - but it is fair to say by kilometre 7 I had fried my legs and my brain - from there on in it became purely a battle of survival to make it to the end. And so for the remainder of the 33km I battled those demons that surface from time to time, the ones that make you question your ability, your goals - the ones that make you lose sight of rational thought where suddenly mind cannot conquer matter......more the mind conquers you! I managed to just squeeze under the 60 minute mark but it was far from the several minutes I normally have spare to play with at the end! So the coach marked it down as an 'OK' result and I marked it down as a learning experience! I protested my case and to my surprise was given the opportunity to repeat the timetrial if I really felt like I could do better - now there's a challenge - don't we always think that we could do better!

So watch out week 17 - I'm coming at you minus the motivational quotes, carbs and playlist!!