This weekend, I’m back to racing.
I’ll be at the Boston Triathlon, but I’m making a change from the original plan. Instead of racing the Olympic distance, I’m dropping down to the sprint.
And I’m actually feeling pretty good about that decision.
The last couple of weeks haven’t exactly been a model training block. I had family visiting for a week, work has been stressful, and somewhere between real life and everything else, my training got pushed around more than I wanted it to. That happens.
It’s really easy when you’re training for something to start obsessing over what you missed. The workout you skipped. The long ride that didn’t happen. The swim you meant to get in. Suddenly you’re doing mental accounting like Garmin is going to send someone to collect the miles you owe. But none of that helps.
I can’t go back and redo the last two weeks. What I can do is make a smart decision about this weekend and start building forward again.
There’s a big difference between going out and racing hard for roughly three hours and racing for somewhere around half that time.
Both are races. Both are workouts. Both can hurt plenty if you do them properly. But the recovery cost is very different.
If I raced the Olympic this weekend, I could absolutely get through it. That isn’t really the question. The question is what happens afterward. How tired am I Monday? What does Tuesday’s workout look like?
Am I actually training again by the middle of the week, or am I still recovering from a three-hour effort that I didn’t really need to do?
That’s where the sprint starts making a lot more sense. I still get to race. I still get the open-water swim, transitions, bike, run, pacing, nerves, logistics and everything else that comes with putting a number on and getting back on a start line.
But I also get to recover faster and get back to productive training.
And right now, that matters more.
Recovery is part of training. This is something I think athletes, myself included, sometimes have a hard time accepting.
Recovery can feel like doing nothing. It isn’t.
Training works because we stress the body and then give it enough time to adapt to that stress. If you just keep piling hard efforts on top of fatigue because the calendar says you’re supposed to, eventually you’re not really training anymore. You’re just getting tired. But there’s a difference.
One big race effort can affect several days afterward. If that race is your goal race, that’s completely fine. You taper for it, race it, recover from it and celebrate what you did.
But not every race has to be treated like the Super Bowl.
Sometimes a race is part of the training. That’s what Boston is for me this weekend.
The bigger goal isn’t having the best possible Boston Triathlon on Sunday.
I have a Half Ironman coming at the end of September, and after that, the NYC Marathon in November. There is a lot of training still ahead of me.
So when I look at the choice between an Olympic and a sprint, I’m not really asking, “Which race can I finish?”
I’m asking: Which choice puts me in the best position for everything that comes next?
Right now, that’s the sprint.
Race Sunday. Recover. Then get back to swimming, biking and running consistently next week instead of spending half the week digging myself out of a hole. That’s the bigger picture.
You don’t have to make up for missed training
This might be the biggest lesson of this little stretch.
When training gets interrupted, the answer isn’t to panic and cram everything you missed into the next seven days.
You just restart. Life got busy. Training slipped. Okay. Start again.
That sounds ridiculously simple because humans apparently prefer turning everything into a complicated moral crisis, but that really is it.
One missed workout doesn’t ruin a training cycle. Neither does a bad week. Even a couple of messy weeks don’t erase all the work that came before them. What matters is what you do next.
For me, that means lining up in Boston Sunday morning, racing the sprint, having some fun with it and remembering what it feels like to race again.
Then Monday starts the next chapter.
Not trying to make up for what I missed.
Just getting back to work.