Mental Toughness

Mental toughness: Let's just say we finely sharpened ours this past weekend. Friday evening, they were predicting tornado-type weather for the entire weekend. We were due a long ride and run, as usual. Saturday morning, we woke up with plans to either drive to Vicksburg to get some hill work in for preparation for Canada, or ride with some friends in Madison.

Yeah. Neither one of those quite happened. Matt woke up early to check out the weather radar. It looked like it was heading straight for us, so we didn't want to chance being out on our bikes for that long period of time. We really didn't have any other plans for the weekend, so I guess no better weekend to have to stay inside.

Here's where the mental toughness comes in: 3 hours 30 minutes on the trainer, followed by a 4 mile brick run. Now, it really doesn't sound THAT bad when you put it into writing, UNLESS you regulary ride a trainer. 1 hour is doable, although not fun. 2 hours is not only not fun, but starts bordering on dreadful. It's where you hit that 3 hours and beyond point where the fun REALLY starts. (sarcastically put, of course ;) We decided to take a mini 5 minute break after each hour. That, combined with non-stop Lost episodes on Netflix made it bearable. The thing that made us want to pull our hair out, though, was the fact that when we got finished, the weather ended up turning out ok. We rode the trainers for that period of time, when we might could have ridden outside:(

Saturday, we also tracked our 4 friends from Mississippi competing in Ironman St. George. It was fun seeing them progress throughout the day!!! We got to watch them all cross the finish line live on ironman.com

Today, however, was another test for mental sharpness, I suppose. Plans were to wake up at 5:30am, hop on the bike trainer (oh,how I missed it SO much!! ;) for 1 1/2 hours, then a long run.

Newsflash once again: that didn't happen. We woke up to see it lightning outside our bedroom window, and could hear the rain pounding down on the rooftop. The bonus was at least that we got to sleep till 8am. Up we went: hopped on the bike trainer to get that over with for the day. We would miss our brick, but did what we could.

Once we got off the trainer, we could see the sun shining. Perfect!!! It's like this was some type of cruel mother-nature joke on the Cassell's !!!!! Ughhh. We couldn't miss church for a long run, that's not even a question, so we decided we would eat a big breakfast, go to church, then come straight home, throw on some running clothes, and get out the door to get that long run complete.

Hello HUMIDITY!!!! If today is any indication of how hot this summer is going to be, we are in for a rude awakening. "Mental toughness", we told ourselves. "Ironman Canada is going to be hotter than IM Florida was, so we need this." (at least we told ourselves that to tolerate the run.) It was 90 degrees with 89% humidity (which we didn't find out until AFTER our long run, once we were severely dehydrated and felt like death warmed-over ;) Never underestimate what hill intervals done on the trainer the day before a long run will do to your leg power!!

It was a LONG, mentally long, run for sure. We aren't used to this heat already, and our bodies showed it. I really don't feel like doing anything the rest of the day, except lay around. (which I most likely will do :)

In the end, though, even though this REALLY was a mentally tough weekend for us, we do realize it will make us stronger. The mental battle of this thing called Ironman really does matter. When you are out on the course for that long period of time, if you don't have mental strength up top, I don't think you'll make it. We have 4 months left to sharpen it up.

With that note, I am going to hibernate on the couch for a bit. My toughness has been sharpened for the day. :)