Brian's Next Blog Attempt

Am I competitive?  Good question.  I don't actually know how to answer that.

Last night we had our final track practice--a 1 mile time trial.  I have mixed emotions about time trials.  I like pushing myself hard to see what I can do, but I'm also scared to find out what my limits are.  I think I'm also pretty scared of finding out that at my very best, I'm not as good as other people out there.  (That should be obvious given that I'm not in the Olympics or anything, but still...)

As always, I was pretty nervous about it.  When even thinking about a time trial, I feel a rush of adrenaline course through my body.  I let that happen once as I was driving to the track, but then tried to relax and save myself for the run.  Although I thought I was able to stay calm, I think I was still really stressed.  I felt tired and had a headache.  During my warmup, I felt like I was gonna puke from lunch (maybe I shouldn't have drank the extra hot sauce).  (Sidenote--is that correct grammar?  "shouldn't have dranken"?  "shouldn't have drunken"?  Mark--help me out here.)

But far too soon, the gun went off and it was time to run.  If I remember correctly, I kept up with Neil for the first full lap then lost him half way through the second.  Around then is where I started having this debate about myself about how competitive I am.  Do I want to push harder to stay up with Neil?  What if I can't?  What if I try to keep pace with him and finally hit that wall where it's simply not possible for me to continue?  What does that even look like?  I've never pushed that hard before, so I don't know what it is.  I must have this subconscious vision of my body totally giving out--me puking and crashing to the ground while everyone else gathers around in a circle laughing and saying "YOU SUCK!".  I have no idea what would actually happen.  I mean--intellectually I know that people are busy doing their own personal bests and no one will stop to say that I suck.  True--I can still justify my fears by worrying that they'll think it, but I'm guessing they won't even do that.  Physically I don't know what would really happen to stop me.  I just have never tried that hard before to see what would happen.  I always stop myself mentally first.  I've certainly pushed myself beyond where I thought I could (Carlsbad Half and IB Triathlon are the races where I pushed through some mental barriers), but I've never pushed hard enough to hit the point where I simply could not continue.

(Oh--actually now I take that back--I did once--Tucson Century ride I push so hard (and drank so little) that I got massive cramps to the point where I couldn't stand while riding my bike at all.  Hmmm...  I'll have to think about this one more--certainly nothing critically bad happened to me because of this.  Maybe I can use it as future motivation.)

Anyway--back to the TT.  Neil kept quite a ways ahead of me.  I just tried to hold my pace and was worried about blowing up too early.  I heard Emily breathing down my neck the last lap and she finally passed me with probably 150 meters to go.  I tried to get motivated to push harder, but somehow I just didn't have it last night.  I still finished in 6:29, which was 1 second faster than my projected time and 18 seconds faster than at the beginning of the season.  It does fall short of my PR of 6:15 though.  Neil finished in 6:01 (WOW!!!!!) and Emily beat me by just a little with a 6:27.

Then this morning I was planning on an ocean swim.  Liz called me shortly after I woke up and told me she wasn't coming.  This was a perfect excuse for me to skip, especially since I didn't get as much sleep as I had wanted, but John told me there were a lot of people coming and that he needed my help.  On the drive there, I remember thinking "I hope it's not just me and John cause I don't think I can keep up with him."  Well--sure enough--I got there and it was just the two of us.  I've been doing a lot of swimming lately and I feel like I've improved, but I spend 99% of my time swimming with people much slower than I am, so I don't really know how fast I am now.

So again, I had to make the decision--do I try to keep up with John or do I let him go and take it easy?  I really didn't want to push it, again in part because I'm scared to fail and see how much faster John is, but I did.  I stayed next to him at first and eventually dropped behind him to draft.  We made it to the quarter mile in 7:42.  After chatting for a couple of minutes, we continued on to the half, making that leg of the journey in 6:53.  (I swear it's shorter to go from the quarter to the half than it is to go from shore to the quarter!)  We hung out and chatted for right at 4 minutes at the half, deciding to come all the way back to shore without stopping.  Once again I didn't feel like pushing it, so now I let John go on ahead.  I kept a pretty good pace and made the half mile back in 13:17, even though I kept getting way off course.  I think my right shoulder was getting tired, cause I kept pulling to the right really bad.  Now, several hours later, I can really feel the workout in my shoulders!  My total time, including just under 6 minutes of stops was 33:44.  I'm actually very happy about that!  My best Olympic distance swim time was 33:37.  This was longer than race distance and I came very close to the same time, even with 6 minutes of stopping and without pushing it as much as I could have.  I did have to push a little bit on the swim though and ended with a side ache.

So am I competitive?  I just don't know.  There are times where I push myself.  Somehow Greg and I had that a lot last year.  For some reason lately I've just been really scared to find out how much I can do, so I feel like I've lost that competitive edge.  I'd like to get it back.  I think.  At least, I'd like to lose my mental blocks and let myself do the best I can whether it's because I'm competing against myself or just on my own.  Guess I'll keep working on that...