More on imploding

After my strangely unanticipated Colorado Trail ITT disaster last week, I've dwelled on the reasons for the physical implosion to try to figure out exactly why my body shut down. I was especially intrigued after hearing that Jill and Scott both had similar experiences in the same week, though likely attributed to very different causes. I've come to the conclusion that my problems were due simply to nothing more than fatigue. Food consumption was right on target, the pace should have been manageable for several days, I was sufficiently hydrated, and was not low on sleep going into the race. I thought that eight days of tapering should have helped freshen up the legs, though a few days longer would have been ideal after the efforts of the previous 3 weeks.

Well, I just finished updating my training log for the past 2.5 months (oops). Fortunately, I have few notes and lots of photos to help me remember what I did on all those days. What I discovered after tallying up the numbers was a bit shocking. Between May 1 and the end of last week, my legs have logged 330 hours of training. That averages out to 30 hours of per week and 4.1 hours of training per day. So what's my point here? If you tend to lose yourself in the sheer enjoyment of what you're doing (i.e., when training no longer feels like a chore and becomes simply fun all the time), keep a better log of your hours than I've managed to do. Had I kept better track of how many hours I was logging, I would have spent far more time off the bike and on the couch (err, in my office) in the weeks leading up to my CT ITT.


That's all from Iqaluit, where it's partly cloudy, balmy, and the mosquitoes are quite hungry. We were supposed to be much farther north tonight, but our plane had some mechanical problems en route and we were forced to turn back. Nuts. Tomorrow we're flying out to Pond Inlet (hopefully) where we'll meet a helicopter to carry us out to set up camp and get this field season underway.