You're Not Behind

I just got back from almost two weeks in Boston and Canada — a trip that landed a little over a month out from my full Ironman. I got runs in where I could and kept up strength work, but swimming and cycling didn’t happen once the whole time I was gone.

A month out is close enough that missing two full disciplines for two weeks puts a thought in your head: am I losing fitness at exactly the wrong time? Am I about to show up imbalanced on race day? You don’t actually lose fitness that fast. But it can sure feel like you do, and your mind will happily run with that feeling if you let it.

What I actually did was keep doing what was in front of me — the runs I could fit in, the workouts that made sense — and let the rest of the trip be a trip. Recovery ended up being incredible. I came back into these last four weeks of training more rested than I’ve been in months, ready to go.

Around the same time, Berlin Marathon weekend hit my feed. People running sub-2:45 times — times that would be a lifetime best for me on a good day. It’s an easy jump from there to: I’m training this hard, so why can’t I run that? Except those people have been training for years, specifically for that race, with a background I don’t have.

Same thing with a sub-10-hour Ironman I saw out of Maryland. The training block looked similar to mine on paper, so the comparison feels fair for about five seconds — until you remember you don’t actually know what you’re comparing. Maybe that’s a former collegiate swimmer with sponsors and a schedule built entirely around this one goal. That’s not my life, and it’s not most people’s. Social media shows you the result, never the years that got them there.

None of that is a knock on anyone posting their results — seeing what’s possible is great motivation. The problem is only in the comparison, treating someone else’s mile marker as the one you should already be standing on.

I used to feel this constantly with marathon training specifically. The second I’d start training for something — say, a sub-4-hour marathon — I’d see other people already there and feel instantly behind, like I’d shown up late to something I hadn’t even started. I’d bail into swimming instead, then feel behind there too, and bail again. Looking back, that wasn’t really about fitness. It was about picking someone else’s timeline and grading myself against it.

I don’t get caught in that as much anymore, but writing this out, I’m realizing I’m not fully past it either — just better at catching it faster. No one’s behind anything. You’re on your own pace, on your own schedule, living your own life — and you’re further along in plenty of areas than you give yourself credit for.

The closest thing I’ve got to proof that process beats panic: the wrist. Indoor training only, no say in the timeline, and it ended up taking almost twice as long to heal as it should have. By the time I finally got back outside, it only took a couple of rides to notice my cycling was better than before the injury. I didn’t skip anything. I trusted whatever training was actually available to me, instead of the training I wished I had.

That’s the part I keep coming back to. It’s you versus you — not you versus a results page. Keep showing up for what’s actually in front of you, trust that the hours add up even when you can’t see it happening, and let the rest of it be someone else’s race.

— Iggy

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