Lessons In Sport

I'm watching the Olympic Trials as I type this... I might get distracted. I love the Trials! Maybe more than the Olympics?? NBC does a great job telling some of the stories of the athletes and I just think its so cool to watch the competitions. One thing I pay attention to is what the athletes say when they get interviewed... Across the board the successful athletes talk about how they try to tune everything out and not think about the results, but instead just focus on the process and what they need to do in each moment to bring out their own very best. Good lessons there!

Today I did another bike session in the HTC Computrainer studio. I rode 5x this week and 4 of those were in there! I do ride pretty hard in there and can get in some quality watts so I guess we'll call this an experiment to see if those transfer over to the road/races.

Today, 8 of us who are going to Vineman all rode part of the course, which was pretty cool. We spent 3.5 hours in there and after a fairly long w/u, did a main set of 5x25min at or slightly above race effort on 5min easy, then 4x2min alternating heavy gear 55rpm w/ 2min spin 95+rpm. I feel like I rode pretty strong today. Figured out how to get my indoor ride files to automatically upload to my Training Peaks account so it was fun to come home and see/analyze my file.

My hip didn't feel terrible so it's possible I could have run but I chose not to. It just seemed like a smarter decision to not push it today. I've spent a bunch of time in the last 24 hours rolling on my Supernova ball (best tool ever for releasing glute spasms) and based on how that has felt, clearly I've got some solid spasms in my glute. I'm just guessing, but it makes sense that a giant spasm in one of those muscles would effectively disable it, which would force another muscle to do more work and eventually that secondary muscle would get pretty pissed off. In my case I *think* it's glute medius that is spasming so TFL compensates and currently TFL is pissed. So the fix is allowing that TFL to rest while getting the glute med spasm to release. That's the route I'm taking anyway trying to fix it. I'm not sure it's really a lack of 'strength' thing. James Dunne (running coach) writes a lot about running form and function and he often posts about lack of strength being caused by "a weakness or an inhibition?" If you're doing all your basic functional strength type exercises but you're still not strong enough to perform your sport without pain, then you have to start looking toward the inhibition side of things trying to uncover/allow the functional strength you want/need. In my case I think I'm strong enough but all those muscles need to be in a state that will allow them to do their jobs effectively.

So far the Olympic Trials swim races I've watched have all been won in the back half of the race. #EnduranceFTW. #DontGoOutTooFast #LessonsInSport