Going into Taper: Fear vs Trust

Taper time is here

Two weeks of minimal exercise where I am advised to “stay off my feet” sounds like wonderful fitness advice that I could stomach, that is… before I began training for triathlon. But, since I have been preparing for this race for well over a year and a half the advice sounds like someone is trying to hijack my progress.

I began Triathlon for two reasons. First, I wanted to raise money for non-profits that help youth with addiction, Click here to support! Second, I wanted to get more in tune with my body through fitness. Yes I wanted to get fit and healthy, but more so I wanted to learn how to finally hear the messages from my body. At 30 years old I was finally getting sober, but I didn't know the difference between true anxiety and the general hypertension I now experienced from unhealthy living. I couldn’t tell if it was depression or just stagnation from my blood pooling up under my muscles and beneath my brain from sitting on the couch so much that it now had an indent of my body.

At 30 years old I had a resting heart rate of 120 and if my heart started pacing any quicker than that then I figured I needed another beer, xanax or to excuse myself and puff a joint. If my back was sore, screw ibuprofen or homeopathic remedies, I would call up my dealer for some hydrocodone, percocet or any other opiate I could find. If my mind was feeling sluggish, I needed to pop an Adderall. If I was hungry then obviously I needed a bag of chips, some pizza and a show on Netflix. For the past 15 years, my body had been screaming at me to listen and after I jumped into the pool for my first swim, I knew triathlon would force me to begin listening. So, I went all in, excited for the things I would begin learning.

I learned a lot. A ton. Through some painful experiences I learned how to trust a strict diet regimen, which you can read about it my article, “The Nutrition Decision That Saved This Triathlete”. I also learned through various injuries, how to start following a training plan, rather than hoping on a treadmill and crushing miles while destroying my neuromuscular system, which you can read about in my article, “Having a plan". As you can read in these articles, these two lessons were obvious and easy to hear.

But taper week is a different sort of lesson. It is one of counterintuitive reasoning and feeling. It’s one where the body says, “keep going I can do this, and need this to continue to grow” while the mind builds up anxiety craving the stimulation from intense sessions. On top of that there is the fear. Because my body and mind are saying one thing and my training plan is saying another, the fear is that everything I have worked on over the past year and half will be lost. I’ll get to the Ironman and have to be rescued or barely make it out of the water, or I’ll have to start walking my bike or I just won’t be able to run after tying my running shoes onto my tingling, tired, feet (all of which nearly happened in my first triathlon).

So I just have to trust. The funny thing about trust to me is that it’s not full blown faith yet, so there is still a lot of fear. I just kind of believe that it will work, because it’s worked for others and for goodness sake, science backs it up. In my experience, faith is like mature trust. It’s built from repetitively seeing the fruit that come through acts of trust. Once faith is built, fear diminishes. For instance, I used to be scared to swim a mile in open water- until I did it a number of times. Now I have faith in my bodies ability, and there is literally no fear when I hop into a lake for a long swim (besides boats, cold water, sharks etc…)

I trust my training plan. It has helped me to reach me great gains. Smart Endurance Solutions has helped me to increase my running speed from 8:30 miles to 6:45 min miles. I now push 24 mph on my bike for 50+ miles where I was struggling to keep 18 mph for 25 miles. My swim has more rhythm and comfort, it has become enjoyable rather than dreaded. I now have faith in the workouts, but since I haven’t yet done the race- I don’t have faith in the taper, instead I have fear. Since I have fear, I know I just need to trust. That’s the way it works. This may, in fact, be the most valuable lesson I have yet to learn. This may be the lesson I have been needing to hear all along.

When life is uncertain, when goals seem unnattainable, far fetched and nothing seems to be going quick enough in the right direction. When fear takes hold because no action seems to get us where we want to go. We have no more devices, no more ideas, no more solutions to get us to where we want to be. 40-miles into the wilderness and the freezing rain keeps pouring smoldering the fire lit by our last match. Maybe in this silence, as we hear our fire smolder, is where we finally confront our deepest fear. Maybe this is where we finally put the flag on the fortress of faith that has been built up by years of stacking blocks of trust, one on top of the other. Maybe these times are built into life, thrown into the wheel we have been cranking so hard, to help remove us from fear, all together, let the wheel roll, our final test.