Answering to Yourself

One of the most difficult things in staying in shape and achieving any goals you may have set for yourself is being able to continue to work at it when you don't really have the motivation to. Yesterday was a perfect example of this for me. I had various aches from a couple workouts earlier this week. My butt was still hurting from 6 rounds of split lunge jumps holding a 30# sandbag and my legs were still feeling the effects of Tuesdays bike ride which was a 34 miler in which I put in my hardest effort yet this season. I spent about 90 minutes at an average power output that was 80% of where I need to be for Mt Washington (not bad for March)... 

Wednesday morning I had an hour to kill between sessions which I spent working on handstand work, assisted and un-assisted muscle-ups, pullups, one-arm pushups, and TGU with heavy med balls. So when Wednesday afternoon rolled in along with a bank of clouds, temps in the low 40's with windchill in the 30's, winds in the 10-20mph range and just an overall rawness in the air, it would have been easy for me to say "screw it" and not go for a ride in the afternoon. But that's not an option for me. I set goals and I know what it takes to achieve them. Lacking motivation to ride because it sucks out is not an excuse and I would have tortured myself (mentally) the rest of the day had I not gone out on the bike. 

Of course I could have opted to ride on the trainer or the rollers or even gone out for a quick 20 miler to at least get the legs moving and it would have given me a "bike ride" entry in my workout log. But the day called for an endurance ride and I had already mapped out a route. The ride took me into the hills of Amherst and Mont Vernon. Roads in the middle of nowhere that still have sand-covered snowbanks on the sides because the sun doesn't get high enough yet to melt any of it. There was a 10 mile section of the ride where every road name had the word "hill" in it. There was "Turkey Hill", "Wilson Hill", "Mack Hill", "Kendall Hill", "Another F'kn Hill".. It was endless, and it was all uphill into Mont Vernon. But once I was coming back down it was awesome! The hill coming out of Mont Vernon is a 50MPH downhill, which was cut down to 43MPH because I was straight into the wind (bummer).  There's a couple things that run through your mind when you're approaching 50MPH on a bicycle.. "Holy crap, this is awesome" and "Don't screw up, you don't have insurance"..

I got back to the gym with 44 miles in my legs, feet that I lost feeling in at about mile 25 from the cold, raw conditions, lungs burning a little from the effort, and a very satisfied feeling that I did what I needed to do to stay on track for my goals this season. It's all about answering to yourself. You have to hold yourself accountable to your goals. It gets easier when you have somebody pushing you, like when you come to work out at Dynamic. Or if you have some friends that you told you would meet for that bike ride even though the weather blows. But when it's just you, the motivation has to come from within. And the more you do it, the better you get at it. It's called mental toughness and it takes a long time to develop. But once it's there nothing will stop you.

It's 8am, 40 degrees, cloudy, raw and damp. The roads are wet from the overnight rains we had.. Guess where I'll be in 30 minutes.....

Be Strong,

kevin