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Redefining boundaries PDF Print E-mail
Friday, 09 April 2010 21:33
LanzaroteTinajo (Lanzarote, Spain) - Lanzarote might be one of the greatest places in the world to train. There is a great 50 meter outdoor pool at Club La Santa, where you can get nice Speedo lines as I did on my unbelievable white butt. You can ride fairly flat, hilly and mountains between one of the 140 volcanoes on the island. And running is perfect on the blue track, on the road or one of the many dirt tracks through the country side. All together enough places and different ways to train and to spend 30 hours of training without noticing it!
Before this trip I camped here at Lanzarote for about a week each time. Every trip was an incredible overload of training, which helped me big time to get where I wanted to be. This fourth time however is just a bit different, not just a week at the island, but two instead. Less hours, less training, less overload, less stress, less people, less more, but still enough was and is done! I got a new change to define my (personal) boundaries. Both mentally and physically I got stretched to and over my boundaries, which made me redefine these boundaries for the future.
I am sitting here on my bed with my laptop on the blanket and am thinking of what I have learned this week about my boundaries. I could give a sum of all these things for each day, but a lot of these issues just involve me. I will not bother you with all that. Power meter and heart rate data is just too personal and will only be of importance to me, because you are not me and I am not you. But there are some things however that could be of benefit to you too.
Everybody has personal boundaries in all kind of different forms. What your maximum heart rate is. How much power output you have at your threshold. How many watts you can manage for each kilo you weigh. What time you managed on one of the triathlon distances. And many more! But these are boundaries that involve numbers. You can define your power output with a test and it will be a certain amount. Your maximum heart rate is a set number. And so on. But there are also boundaries to which you cannot give a number. Could you give a number for your feeling of today’s workout? I would give mine about an 7, but it might have been a 7,2 or even a 7,25…. You might have a scale with the numbers 1-10 on there, but in fact it is impossible to measure it in these numbers. Your body is not a machine, which works or does not. Your body will work, but perhaps not at the best efficiency as you hoped if you crossed your mental/physical boundaries.
Okay, now back to Lanzarote and the boundaries. Although I will not give numbers, I still found out a lot about boundaries that involve numbers. A quick review might be in place here, but nothing major. I use a SRM power meter on the bike and TIMEX heart rate monitor for the run. From both I can download the data and look at it after my training. One of the things I learned from looking at these graphs is what power output I should have during a race and which number not to exceed in order to keep my pace higher in the end of the ride. This boundary is really helpful for the trainings and races to come.
But there are also boundaries which cannot be put into a number. The last two weeks (there is still one day to go tomorrow) were tough! One of the other boundaries involves that enough is enough! There is really no need to do more than possible in weeks in which overload is the ‘most’ used word. Sometimes it is just better to skip a training, than just to keep on going. Each time I did not feel well enough to complete the training I skipped it, or did just a part of it. Sometimes these boundaries are meant to be broken, but not if you are already doing more than usual and when you body is screaming out loud to quit!
Perhaps one of the  most important boundaries is me, myself & I or you, yourself & thy (I really doubt if this little line is common in English). There is really no need to look at others when training! And even in races you are the only one who is making and pushing your own boundaries and not those of the other competitors. There are two possible things that could happen: you train to hard or you train to slow! My pace is not yours and yours is not mine. My physical and mental boundaries are different from yours. I found out to stop at my own boundaries and not at those of others. I did not train to slow or to hard, I trained just right!
These are just three of the boundaries I pushed, stretched and redefined during the last two weeks. This camp has been great. I found out a lot about myself. What to do and what not to do and where to stop. It feels like I got to know myself a bit better, but there is still a lot to learn. Training is learning, not just for the body, but also for the mind. I found out that is really difficult to even understand myself (not to mention others). I hope that this article will help you to find some of your boundaries and redefine them as I did and understand some more of yourself.