Good News Bad News Go Hand In Hand

We had end of month time trial last night at practice. Good news was I beat my previous best time for flying 200 by half a second so it is now 23s flat. Bad news was I had my worst 500m in the entire season, clocking at 1:03.81.

I'm not exactly thrilled about these results but I'm not entirely surprised either. I've been working hard on technique in the month of August so the improvement in the flying 200 makes sense (phew!). As for the slow time, well, I was hungry at practice. Planning my food intake has always been a challenge for me and every once in a while, I would suddenly decide that eating is a sign of a weak mind. When that kind of loopy mentality kicks in, skipping meals or being paranoid about eating is not uncommon and as a result, my performance suffers.

This was exactly what happened in the last couple of days. When I skated to the start line for my 500 TT, I felt all the energy drained from my muscles. I had to slow down in the corners because my muscles just didn't have the necessary strength to hold. By the time I was done, I was breaking out in cold sweat all over, a sure sign of low blood sugar. It was not fun.

I must break out of this mentality soon as I have a 42k race coming up on Sunday in Ottawa. I NEED to eat normally for at least three days leading up to the race otherwise it would be deja-vu like last year. Bonking during a race was terrible and I don't want that to happen again.