building mental toughness through winter training

Winter training sucks.  It's dark when I get to the pool.  It's dark when I leave the pool, even when I'm stuck with an extra 15 minutes getting ready because I have to blow dry my hair.  It's lugging extra items in my swim bag to bundle up from the cold.  Yuck, yuck, yuck.

Early morning arrival at Providence pool for swim practice.

In the afternoons, it gets dark way to early to think about biking outside, even if the weather agrees with it (though it rarely does).  All midweek rides are done indoors.  In fact, indoor spin sessions are even built into our training plan.  The team meets at several locations to knock out the workout, but I choose to do mine on my own just because I like to get it out of the way as soon as possible after work, and not sit around until 6:30.

These weekday rides are under and hour; an acceptable time span to spend on the trainer (set up to directly face the television in the living room).  On the weekends, however, we are faced with a decision to brave the conditions or spend a miserable amount of time indoors on the trainer.

My water bottle actually froze on my drive to the ride start; this was one cold & miserable ride!

I've been trying to get outdoors for all of my weekend runs and bikes no matter what the temperature, but sometimes the threat of ice on the roads dictates that it's too dangerous for Xena.

For long runs, I will pretty much face any kind of outside weather.  The idea of spending multiple hours on a treadmill is even more terrible than the bike trainer.

Weekday short runs on the treadmill is semi-bearable, as long as there's something decent to watch on TV, but on my recovery weeks, I cannot justify driving the 1.6 miles to my yoga class, and do a short run to and from the studio, in the dark. It takes a special kind of motivation to get bundled up to run at night in the dark!

And then, there have been mornings I had to choose between running in snow on the track or sucking it up and doing the full track workout on a treadmill.  Those are the worst.  There is no minute longer than a treadmill minute!

I will admit that I've let the crappy weather serve as an excuse to skip a workout here and there, but for the most part I believe I am building up the mental toughness to survive the monotony of the long training rides and runs later in the year.

I freaking cannot wait for spring and warmer weather!!!