More Of A Guideline

There's one difference between Cat and me when it comes to Ironman training. She is very serious about training and follows the training schedule by the book, as if they were rules one must abide by in order to finish the godforsaken race. As for me, I too am very serious about training. However, my view of the training schedule is more like Bill Murray in "Ghostbusters": "It's more of a guideline than a rule."

Now I'm not saying that either one of us is right or wrong. To the contrary, there are probably bits of right and slivers of wrong in both of our viewpoints. As a matter of fact, I think I might be choking on a piece of right-wrong as I write this crapola. I'm just sayin' that different points of view lead to different challenges. Let's take today as a fer instance. Cat and I had both a morning swim and an evening run on the schedule for today. Of course when we woke up in the morning, I couldn't stop my yappin', which led us to miss the morning activity. And just as suddenly we were left having to do a swim AND a run in the evening. Oops.

Well, I had a somewhat stressful day at work and left a bit later than expected. Cat had an even more stressful day at work and left even later than expected. Now we're both in a similar situation - let's look at what the participants do.

I drive home already convinced that I will do no exercise whatsoever for the day. I'm tired, I'm hungry and its going to take a nation of millions to squeeze my sorry ass into a bathing suit. I go home, lay on the couch and eat to the point just short of nausea.

Cat, on the otherhand, is tired and hungry like me, yet she drives directly to the pool and is ready to do a swim and a run, activities which would get her home somewhere on the darker side of 10pm. And she's stressed about it. Oh so stressed.

The thing is, I really believe she would've swam and run tonight had I not talked to her and tried to convince her that missing a workout is ok. She's dedicated - and inspiring - like that. And though she decided not to swim or run tonight (which I still feel guilty about, even though I didn't make her decide this way), she had every intention of following that training schedule to a T. So I mark down in my training diary of life that Cat followed through with the exercise whilst I continued down the one way street to portliness.

I have a feeling that there is something we can learn from each other in here. If I weren't so damn tired, I'd probably come up with a good moral to this inane rambling.

But I am tired. So you're on your own, punk.

I've got a 1 1/2 hour ride in the morning and I'll be damned if I'm going to miss my workout tomorrow.