As I headed out for my run, last night, I knew it would be interesting. An odd mix of weather the past few days had produced a heavy fog. Much of our snow has melted, and the sidewalks are covered with mixed patches of water, snow, ice, and actual sidewalk. I planned for cold, wearing both short and long sleeve technical shirts with zipped technical pullover on top of that. A beanie cap and gloves finished the ensemble.
About three miles in, the dead calm air and warmer than expected temps had me slowly stripping things off. First, the hat. Then the gloves. Eventually, I slipped my arms out of the pullover and rolled that down around my waist. Between the sweat I was generating and the mist in the air, I got soaked through pretty quickly.
A couple of turns later, I was headed back the other direction into a very slight headwind. A few miles of that, and I had all the clothing back in place. It was getting darker, and the fog was becoming more of a factor. What started out as limited visibility quickly became much worse. Eventually, the sunglasses came off. Even then, I was limited to seeing things within about 50 yards. It was kind of surreal.
The conditions made for what was probably one of the most challenging long runs I've had, lately. More challenging than running a majority of the marathon leg of IM Wisconsin a few short weeks after Louisville. And more challenging than a half marathon on a 1/10th mile track. This was 15 miles spent completely inside myself because the fog prevented me from considering things on the "outside."
It got me to thinking that our training and racing can sometimes get that way. If we become too focused on one particular aspect of an event, we can lose the big picture. If our goal is to achieve a PR or beat a given time, we might forget about the other things that make triathlon so amazing. Or, the opposite might happen. We might spend so much time being social that we forget that a race is even occurring. Though rarely the most important factor, we ARE racing against a clock and/or other participants.
We might also get into a fog if we overtrain. If you find yourself stumbling from workout to workout without enjoying what you are doing, you might be overdoing it. Things have a way of getting hazy when we aren't taking care of ourselves.
If you find yourself in a perpetual fog, evaluate your circumstances. Take a step back and figure out what is causing it to happen. Are you overtraining? Have you lost track of one important aspect or another of the sport? What changes can be made to help clear things up?
Fog is easy to resolve. It just takes a bit of bright sunshine to burn it off. And that applies to all fog, whether literal of figurative.
RSS Feed