Brian's Next Blog Attempt

Here I am 3 days before SDI.  Apparently I had more of a plan for this race than I thought.  Now I wish we had the technology for me to track your eyes while reading this just so I could play a sound as you read.  But for now, just imagine the ding and buzzer from Family Feud as you read the yes and no responses.  So have I been following the plan?

1. Sleep: NO Despite the fact that the weather has returned to comfortable sleeping weather and the fact that I've been very tired, I still haven't been sleeping well.  I get to bed right around midnight every night and then have problems falling asleep with my mind racing about all the things I need to do and about my love life (or lack thereof).  Then for some reason I wake up every morning between 4 and 4:45.  Most mornings I can fall back asleep after an hour or so, but this morning, I had so much on my mind that I couldn't sleep and finally just got out of bed at 6:45.  It's possible that I'd sleep more if I got to bed at a reasonable hour, but so far I haven't been able to force myself to get to bed earlier.
   
2. Taking it easy on my workouts and fully recovering physically:  NO  I'm sure the lack of sleep isn't helping my recovery, but neither is my continuing to workout.  I thought I could still go to the gym on Monday and recover by the race, but my trainer had my do 50 pullups and I'm still sore from that this morning.  I went to track on Tuesday and did that all out.  I took it easy at swim last night, but I think that's still also contributing to my sore shoulders this morning.  I did take today off from the gym though, so hopefully that will help.  But, I'm not going to skip the Friday cove swim since this is the last time I'll get to do it this season because I'm doing PacGrove/Nation's Tri swims on Friday nights until September.  (I will try to get out for an ocean swim on the weekends though.)
3. Preparing my mental game:  NO  I need to be totally pumped for this race and be focused on pushing until it hurts.  Instead, I'm just getting annoyed at all the things this race is keeping me from doing and I'm really looking forward to it being over.  Maybe I've lost that competitive edge.  Maybe my priorities have changed so I just want to be more social than hardcore.  Or maybe I just am not getting enough sleep to care about racing.  I hope I can get in at least one race this year where I've got the mental game dialed in so I can give it my all.