One brain-melt with a side order of crushed optimism

Sometimes there’s so much to do, or one thing to get done is so massive and overwhelming, that I freeze up and don’t get anything done at all. This never happens at work, but it does happen at home, and it happened with this blog last week.  I had a dozen ideas of things to write about, freaked out about not being able to do all of them and ended up not writing a thing. Really, the way to handle it would have been to do a few different entries over the course of the week. But God forbid I should break my arbitrary one-entry-a-week rule by writing too much instead of too little.

Feeling this overwhelmed is a fairly consistent thing at the moment, anyway, what with trying to train and work and everything else. This weekend the weight has been lifted somewhat because I have holes in my left foot and can’t train properly for two days – which is obviously going to do great things for my athleticism, but frankly that’s been doing really badly anyway. I’m basically stricken with guilt whatever happens at the moment. When I train, I feel guilty because I’m not sorting out my home life. When I try to deal with home, I feel guilty for not training properly. So both home and training are in a state of half-arsedness at the moment. It’s just fabulous, as you can imagine.

I have 11 weeks to go until the race (still plenty of time for training, I tell myself – hell, the standard plan for a marathon is 16 weeks!) and about six weeks until the familiarisation weekend that I’ve signed up for – which will at least tell me if I can get round the course. I don’t think, at the moment, that I can. It irks me to write it down, but I have no confidence in my ability to do 70.3 at the moment. I wish I’d picked a flatter course. Though I can at least turn up and try, and if I get dragged off the course for being too slow, so be it. If I finish it, everything else is going to look easy as pie.

I am having health worries at the moment, which I have been avoiding getting checked out because I don’t think it’s really anything major, and if it is, I don’t want to know. Note to reader: this is not the way to approach your health.  Tremors in my arms and legs; difficulty breathing; palpitations: all the fun things.  I was getting chest pains just going up the stairs, but those seem to have stopped now. I don’t know what it’s like to have a panic attack, so maybe that’s what this is. Nerves. I’m going to try meditating or something, see if that helps. Anyway, that’s been making training a bit difficult and less enjoyable than normal, to say the least.

I went for a bike ride a couple of weekends ago and got quite badly lost, in pouring rain, to the point of accidentally ending up at home. The weekend after that was a recovery week. This week, see aforementioned holes-in-feet. BUT I have finally got me some clipless pedals and shoes – heaven knows, my biking could do with the extra power – and aim to get some practice clipping in and out on the turbo and just generally getting used to them. I’m quite excited, actually. Once I’ve got them sorted, I will head to a park. I find it difficult to measure how well I’m doing at my cycling on the road, because I’m still so terrified of cycling in amongst all the cars that my breathing and adrenaline are at silly levels before I even hit the hills. So train to Richmond it is.

On the train with my bike is also how I’m getting to Wimbleball for the familiarisation weekend, which I’m actually more nervous about than the race itself. Tickets are bought and paid for, no backing out now! I keep telling myself that if it’s so very bad, at least I’ll know to pull out of the race. I really, really want to back out of the stupid half-iron (sometimes, and sometimes I’m ok – at the moment, I want to back out). I sick of training, I’m sick of organising, I’m burnt out.  But then I remember all the other easier (probably) things I have planned for after this, which will be even easier if I keep the training up and think I may as well go through with it.

Anyway, a very talented writer friend (who has a blog here) is picking me up from the station, getting me to the lake and generally has sorted out my travel and accommodation concerns in one fell swoop. Because he’s awesome. But don’t tell anyone I said that, because it’ll ruin his carefully built bad reputation.

At the moment, the order of focus goes #1 Paris Marathon (which is next weekend, and I haven’t figured out how I’m training in Paris yet), #2 familiarisation weekend, #3 race.  After that the more laidback things start to happen and I can’t WAIT to have fun doing distances I know I can do and not worrying about every little thing. I also can’t wait to be able to walk again – I stuck to the sofa right now. Which means I might actually write more this weekend, because there’s not much else to do.