WCR is off break, but I'm having an easy reentry week because I'm getting over a cold. And in a way, this cold is the crowning accomplishment of my summer break. In a good way!
I learned this summer that break is the best thing ever, and I hope to bring this lesson into the new season by being as hardcore about recovery as I am about working out, like Robert Mitchum demonstrating love and hate in The Night of the Hunter, except that workout and recovery don't fight each other, they join forces like the Wonder Twins. So, not like Night of the Hunter. But it's a great speech, anyway. And I like to keep it current for any hipsters who think they invented knuckle tattoos.
Though evidently, my idea of break is working out four times a week. But I only skated once a week, I haven't skated once a week since 2007! I did need to try skating less, just to see what would happen. If it didn't work out, I could go back to skating like a possessed person based on scientific experiment and not superstition. I knew, though, that science was already on the side of tapering and crosstraining, because science is sane like that.
I did actually rest, though! This break I really, finally, experienced Sunday as a day of rest. Even though I finished with Sunday rioters practice by the end of April, I didn't have Sundays free and clear for one reason or the other—training for Walk & Roll, then Walk & Roll, then Brew Ha Ha— until after the championship. It was a revelation, when it finally happened.
I didn't have any ungodly early practices or any ungodly faraway practices. That meant, in effect, no speed practices, that's how I ended up only skating once a week. It's nothing against speed practices, and in fact my initial instinct when I got wind of this break was to sign up for every speed practice in the tri-county area. A thing I've read is that willpower is an exhaustible resource. Shoalmate Shannanigan calls these self control hearts, as in a video game. You can get yourself out of bed Saturdays at 5:30 AM for weeks and weeks, and then you get tired, obviously, from not sleeping, but also from using up self control hearts to get yourself out of bed.
I had plenty of self control hearts to throw into crosstraining: plyometrics workouts, which were basically all my little twenty minute workouts strung together with some new stuff added from Jumping Into Plyometrics
Not as much as I did everything else, but I also ran a bit and the grand finish of my break turned out to be running the 5K Race Judicata last Thursday. Great Scott, last week. It seems like a lifetime ago. I had no idea when I signed up that it was going to be all lawyers. At the starting line, I overhead a dude say that anything less than thirty minutes for a 5K was "embarrassing." Well, I finished in 33:34. All my earlier runs were around thirty-seven or thirty-eight minutes, so I'm pretty pleased. I ran every step of this 5K, and actually sprinted the last 20 yards.
That was the grand finish, because the next day I got sick. So then I had a week of total rest, right at the end of my break. Now I'm rested and ready for the new season...
