Being Away

So in my line of work, you have periods of time where you work from 8 am to midnight for days on end. Usually, you get one day off, and that's for sleep and laundry and sleep. Sometimes these jobs take you out of town. So compound the long hours with unfamiliar territory and your training goes to hell in a handbasket.

You try getting yourself out of bed to do a brick (bike and run) that needs to last roughly 2 hours total and get showered and fed in time to get to the theater. Well let's break it down. In bed, at earliest, by 12:30 am. This particular job has allowed me to show up at 9 am, so be in the lobby by 8:45 am. 30 mins to eat breakfast, since they are pretty fast at the hotel restaurant. At my quickest I can shower and dress in 30-40 mins. I don't move very fast when I'm tired. OK 2 hours to do the workout plus 10 mins to get to and from the hotel fitness room. Then 10-20 mins to get up and dressed.

Grand total 3 hours and 30 mins. That's less than five hours of sleep. Given that I can schedule a day of rest from training when is appropriate, I would have to do that for five days, and my day off from the theater would be just a training day - after sleeping in of course. So, that's not going to happen. It's not safe to train and be that tired.

The next option is to shorten the workout, but the usual option is to skip it altogether. I did a week of this schedule already and managed to fit in two 35 min sessions. I had few days to be back in NYC after that week and managed to make it to two training sessions. One of which was a run. It was a pacing workout with a 1 mile pick up and two 3/4 mile pick ups for a total of 5.8 miles. It was tough, and normally it would be hard because I push myself, but this was worse.

I had to walk a good portion of my recoveries to get my heartrate down, and walked most of the cool down. At this point our training is more intense, because we are nearing race day. It was frustrating. Even more so, because I knew I had to do the same work schedule for another week. So my goal is to do a longer workout tomorrow - my day off - and catch a couple more days next week. But as we have been told it's water under the bridge. No point in training to squeeze extra stuff and potentially hurting myself.

Again patience, patience, patience.