Avoiding the bucket

This entry is in response to an email from Chuckie asking for athletes's thoughts on an article about being "in the bucket", i.e. exhausted from training. Being in the bucket can wipe out one's motivation, can require copious amounts of sleep to recover from, and is generally a detriment to improvement.

I have a few thoughts after reading the article. First, I'm not sure I've ever "been in the bucket". I am almost always motivated for training, and when I'm not motivated it's typically not because I'm physically tired. (Though training surely contributes to my occasional mental tiredness.) I've never been so shelled that I operated at reduced capacity outside of training. Perhaps I haven't been in the bucket because I typically train alone and thus am rarely tempted to go harder than the training plan calls for. With masters and potentially some group running in my future, avoiding excess intensity is something I'll have to be more attentive to in the future.

My second thought is: If there is any secret to training, that secret would be how to strike the perfect balance between work and rest. The reason training can be complicated is because each person has a unique balance that leads to optimal results, both compared to other people and compared to that same person at a different time. Like most athletes, I err to the side of too much work (though it's very possible that another athlete with more mental resolve would disagree with my self-assessment). If I'm a bit more fatigued than normal at the start of a workout, I typically tell myself to toughen up and do the workout. Only when I'm feeling extraordinarily tired do I bag a workout. Tapering, however, is an exception during which I err to the side of rest.

One other thing I should be careful of is that my desire to improve dictates that I increase my training load from year to year. (A quick aside applying the platitude "If you keep doing what you're doing, you'll keep getting what you're getting," to training: Assuming one is improving with training, will continuing that same training lead to additional improvement, or will it lead to stagnation? I think the answer is that doing the same training may continue to lead to improvement, but after a certain point it will lead to stagnation. Testing can indicate when training is no longer leading to improvement.) While I expect to be able to handle a greater training load each year, each increase in my training load has the potential to upset my heretofore successful balance between work and rest. A recent interview with Linsey Corbin on Slowtwitch comes to mind (you can bet I was shocked to find something of substance in a triathlon interview). Linsey said something like she want to get faster so she trained harder, but her harder training only caused her to become slower. In response to becoming slower, she trained harder still but only became even slower.

While going easier goes against what most athletes view as the way to improvement, I hope that if my training becomes unbalanced as a result of an increased training load that I will respond by going easier, not harder. After the fact I'm sure it's very apparent when one takes on too large of a training load, but in the heat of things working harder seems so logical. I can understand that pros feel the need to push their boundaries even more than age-groupers, as without taking risks no pro is going to be the best in the world (plus, thanks to Chrissie Wellington female pros must feel a giant need to push their training to the limits). The takeaway is this: don't be afraid to go easier. I write this more as a note to myself than as a warning to others. Hopefully by typing this out I will be more likely to have the confidence to back off if I sense (or better yet, measure) that my training load is too great.