Road to IRONMAN Blog #9 — A tough call, a truly lovely gesture and back to it
This is a short blog post as I’ve done not a whole lot of training over the past 2 weeks, just to allow myself to fully recover and kind of have a break from it both mentally and physically. But a couple of notable things happened/didn’t happen this past week, and this week coming I’ll be getting back to it!
The tough call
So I cancelled my flight to Lanzarote for last Saturday a week before the event, but I knew if I wanted to, I could still fly out on the Thursday beforehand. I was feeling a lot better on Tuesday and I spoke to my coach who said if you’re feeling ok you’ll probably be alright to do the Ironman on Saturday, at which point I was then thinking ‘oooh maybe I could fly out on Thursday, yea it’ll be hectic, but I could do it…’ and for someone who knows that making big decisions is often one of their weaker points, I wasn’t particularly enjoying the next couple of hours before I went to bed deciding whether I should book the flight on Thursday and go and do it as originally planned or not. If I chose to go I would have had to of taken Wednesday off, get a few last remaining peices of kit, get to Nottingham and stay the night for the 7am flight the following day and when I arrived, reassamble my bike, check in, get familiar with everything and do the remaining admin ‘stuff’. So I was thinking, well fairly hectic, but doable. My main concern was how I felt physically, the Ironman itself would obvisouly take a lot of effort, on top of that I wasn’t fully 100% yet at the time I would say and I was going to be travelling during the pandemic. So on the basis of my health, I made the really tough call to not go.
When I woke up on Wednesday though, I was pondering if I had made the wrong decision and whilst I sat outside with my coffee before work, I was contemplating if I could/should change my mind and go. But I stuck with the original decision not to go and now I feel it was the right move and I’m ok about it. Sure it wasn’t the most ideal situation to cancel my Ironman after 6 months of continuous training and now I’ve got more training to look forward to for a while, but it’s just another challenge to deal with along the way and in the whole scheme of things it’s nothing and there are much worse things people have to deal with in this world, so it’s all good :)
I have to share this — how lovely is this!
When I got home on Saturday from visiting our amazing team in London on Friday, I had an envelope on my desk and as I opened it I saw it was a card but I wasn’t quite sure what it was upon first glance. However as I opened it up, I was taken aback by how lovely this gesture was. Truly what an amazing team. If any of you are reading this, thank you so much again — I really really loved this! And here it is:
And how lovely that was and is to read! Thank you all again!
So as I move forwards, I’m all about keeping a positive outlook on this, my plan is to get back to training this week, there’s some Ironman events available in August, so pending on the countries being open and able to travel to, that’s my next plan — to do one of those and hit my goal of getting my first Ironman under my belt!
So to wrap things up, what did I learn from this? Well I think first and foremost it’s about listening to your body, I think a large part of me falling ill was due to a serious amount of training the weekend before, which I don’t think was the reason for continuoing to be ill, but possibly made me more succestible to getting ill, and hence it was super important to just rest, recover and get better (but not that I really had a choice, at the time I wasn’t good for much else haha). On top of that I think it’s about making the right decision, for me maybe not the one I wanted to make, but perhaps the wiser one - as much as I wanted to go on Thursday, I also kind of didn’t and based on my health and wanting to be both fully physically & also mentally ready for the event, I chose not to go. And lastly I think it’s about not letting a setback keep you back, and another shout out to my idol at the moment — David Goggins and his book Can’t Hurt Me, he overcame plenty of setbacks in his life and bounced back from them to achieve his often pretty insane goals — so I 100% recommend that book and shout out to you David for inspiration here.
So wrapping things up, thank you all for reading and let’s bring on the next phase in this journey!
Cheers :)
Cal
