Things May Not Always Go My Way...

For every fantastic practice that I enjoy, there is a bad practice just around the corner. Today was suppose to be one hard practice leading up to a bit of tapering. However, after three consecutive days of being off-skates (though not off-training), I felt absolutely horrible at practice today.

Practice was the usual flying 200s and points race. For the technical drills, coach EG had us work in pairs for some drills on attack awareness and those drills required us to skate at race pace. I worked with GN and without some adequent warm up, I had a hard time catching my breathe just to complete the exercise.

Next we launched into a group warm up which started off well enough. I was skating behind SaH and the pace was controlled and steady. However, it did not take long before it felt way harder than a warm up pace. My legs felt heavy and my strides were laboured. I left the pack to roll around the track for a bit. By the time I rejoined the pack, it was already the start of those flying 200s. I did not expected the acceleration and left the pack. I did a few of the 200s but I just felt like an absolute mess...I even stepped on my own skates during crossover not once, but at least five times. The effort of completing the sprints took so much out of me that I had trouble skating up to the pack during group up time. I ended up rolling around on the outside for the pack to lap me in most cases because I just felt so exhausted.

For the first 2k of the points race, coach AH wanted to handicap the race so that only the slowest four skaters were allowed to go for points (that included me). By this time, I didn't even want to skate anymore. Skating at the front with any decent amount of speed and going for points? Ha, like I was gonna do it. I stayed in the front for three laps before getting out of the pack to skate on the outside. Oh did I mention how much I did not want to skate? I continued skating by myself on the outside lane until the end of practice and made it a point not to skate with anyone. I felt torn between listening to my body and fighting to train hard (which was of course the right thing to do). Unfortunately, once again, I let my emotion got the best of me and wasted valuable training opportunity.

Believing in myself is a key part of learning to be a strong competitor. I cannot let one bad practice to shake my confidence. Yet it is difficult not to doubt myself when I slacked off, gave up, and sucked so badly today. On a mildly brighter side, perhaps it is good that I got my bad-skate-of-the-week out of the way instead of having it haunt me at the race this Saturday. Staying positive when things do not go my way is one hard lesson to learn indeed.

Comments

[Cor]

Sounds like someone needs a few days off training to regroup.

[Candy]

Bad timing for "off training regrouping" with a marathon in Chicago this Sat! :D

Have to toughen up and get over it.