Iron Fatigue or, The Fog of War

So tired…must keep training…can’t wait for taper…just let me race the Ironman pleeeease.

Holy cow I forgot how tired I get during this heaviest, final full month of training for an iron distance race! Everything you are doing is at max volume, you are constantly either sore, stiff, fatigued or all three. By the time I roll into the office in the mornings I am just about out of my mind. It’s difficult to focus, difficult to track conversations and difficult to act upbeat and chipper.

Just last week I was in a meeting with my supervisor who half-way through asked me if I was sick. I told her “that depends on how you would define sickness. Right now I am in my peak training period for an Ironman so I’m feeling pretty loopy a lot of the time.” She said, “Oh yeah, your sick.”

Today’s workout was probably the toughest bike ride on the IMAZ training slate, 100 miles with 5483 feet of elevation gain. Me and the IMAZ Outlaws completed the ride in six hours flat…well, ok, 6 hours 1 minute and 38 seconds but who’s counting, right?

We really hammered the ride hard and it was exhausting. The ride has kind of a T shape to it but is really more reminiscent of a scorpion. It basically consists of on huge climb out of the Rio Grande valley up into a high elevation canyon that splits the Sandia and Manzano mountain ranges. Once you climb out of the river valley you do about a 14 mile climb to the south up into the Manzano mountains, scream back down to the canyon and then climb another 10 or so miles north up into the Sandia mountains. Killer!

On tap tomorrow, a run of some distance…maybe 16 miles I don’t know, I’m still trying not to push the run too much. Then I’m going to take a break from the formal training and hit some single track dirt trail through the Bosque on my new mountain bike…Oh yeah, you heard me…a new mountain bike. I’ll post that one later after I get out of my training fog long enough to snap some pics.