I talked my coach into letting me do this race as I felt it would be a really good training day and not all that hard. Looking at the altitude profile for the race compared to the Firecracker 50 it had less altitude gain so I figured it would be an easier race and good chance to get more exposure to climbing and 10,000 ft plus elevation.
I never once thought it was going to be the biggest mental challenge I would face thus far this year! This race could have very easily have been another disasterous DNF for the 2009 season, but just when things were at their worst I decided I would be hauled off the course in an ambulance before I added another DNF to my comeback!
So many things went wrong in my preparation for this race and even during the race that today's success was 100% mental strenth and shear determination. After the beat down I have suffered for most of this year, this victory of just finishing this race is a major accomplishment. I knew I would regain the mental strength I had years ago when racing, but I just wasn't sure when. It's nice that I can actually say today was that day, because I really figured that it would just happen over time and maybe months from now I would just randomly realize that it had happened. There was no celebration though. I was so physically exhausted, mentally drained, and actually in physical pain that I was really just glad the race was over. I knew once I recovered and the pain disappeared this race would go down as a great defining moment of the 2009 comeback!
This race was actually a good slap in the face before my ultimate goal of the Leadville 100, (coming up in just 3 weeks), as I'll soon describe in a more detailed write up, the poor preparation and over-confidence I had was not a combination of mistakes that I could afford to make for the 100...
Click here for the Garmin 705 GPS Data link on my Garmin Connect website
Stay tuned for my next posting with more details of what actually happened during the race...!
I never once thought it was going to be the biggest mental challenge I would face thus far this year! This race could have very easily have been another disasterous DNF for the 2009 season, but just when things were at their worst I decided I would be hauled off the course in an ambulance before I added another DNF to my comeback!
So many things went wrong in my preparation for this race and even during the race that today's success was 100% mental strenth and shear determination. After the beat down I have suffered for most of this year, this victory of just finishing this race is a major accomplishment. I knew I would regain the mental strength I had years ago when racing, but I just wasn't sure when. It's nice that I can actually say today was that day, because I really figured that it would just happen over time and maybe months from now I would just randomly realize that it had happened. There was no celebration though. I was so physically exhausted, mentally drained, and actually in physical pain that I was really just glad the race was over. I knew once I recovered and the pain disappeared this race would go down as a great defining moment of the 2009 comeback!
This race was actually a good slap in the face before my ultimate goal of the Leadville 100, (coming up in just 3 weeks), as I'll soon describe in a more detailed write up, the poor preparation and over-confidence I had was not a combination of mistakes that I could afford to make for the 100...
Click here for the Garmin 705 GPS Data link on my Garmin Connect website
Stay tuned for my next posting with more details of what actually happened during the race...!
No comments:
Post a Comment