Head, Heart and Gut.

Most decisions we make are a combination , sub consciously or consciously, of head, heart and gut. Well it seems I’ve had a weekend long battle with these three. I have trained very well this week. It has been very hard, but I have hit some very good numbers. However, of late I have not been enjoying longer rows particularly so yesterday I decided to do an interval based Half Marathon ladder session. It broke the session into decreasing bite sized chunks which got faster, but would hopefully allow me to stay more interested and hit a session with plenty of volume.

It was a nice day so I set the rowing machine up outside with the following session.

6000m R18
5000m R20
4000m R22
3000m R24
2000m R26
1097m R28.

(rest 2m 30s between intervals).

It was mid morning and I felt OK so off I went. (I put my HR on, but kept it covered to look at afterwards). The first two intervals were not deathly, although I did feel more tired than I should have done the further they went on and I was very hot, but mentally after 2 reps in this session you are past half way so cracked on (revealing the HR after did show my HR was high). Well not far into the 4km R22 it was definitely taking a fair bit more out of me than it should have so I was starting to consider my options. Heart wanted to continue, but my head and gut said stop and bank the relative quality up to that point. I compromised by adding a split to my target for a while, but that had little bearing on how I felt and mentally I then questioned the point of it. So I stopped half way through that R22 as the clock ticked on.

This is where the mental battles began! I finally decided to switch the monitor off and do the other half of the session the following morning if I felt fresher, but it had definitely not sat well with me that I didn’t finish there and then.
I woke up this morning feeling tired, but surely 10km would be fine so I set the monitor for the remaining metres and got started. Very soon into the first interval I realised I didnt feel great still so swapped it for a Watt Bike interval session. Got that done, but there was still a part of me that wasn’t happy the original session was not complete! A few hours later and my eldest daughter offered to look after the other kids so I could train again and I was determined to get the job done however I felt. Well I managed it, the numbers were not special as such, but completing this was about way more than numbers after 24 hours wrestling with my head, heart and gut.

Whether it should have been as big a part of my weekend as it was is another debate, but these things are never straight forward and now at least after it I can stop thinking what is the right thing to do and put this session to bed.