Sometimes I have to travel with my job and that always presents a challenge, when it comes to my workout schedule.  Fortunately, my coach is very flexible and is skilled at working everything out for me.

So for this upcoming trip, we scheduled an early morning hard bike session for today, a day off tomorrow and back to my regular schedule on Thursday, when I am back home.  While not ideal, this works just fine; I’m not really missing out on much while on a short trip like this.

To get my bike workout done, I had to get up at 4.30am this morning.  This is about an hour earlier than I normally rise, but I had to be at work early today for a meeting.  My alarm went off and I was up quickly.  I decided I wanted coffee and a few minutes to fully wake up, before heading to the basement and getting onto my trainer.  I chose a double espresso shot for good measure!

About thirty minutes later I was on my bike and warming up.  I got into the main part of the workout, which was hard session of high cadence sprints  – 20 x 40 seconds on 90 seconds rest.  Five intervals in and I was fading bad; I think that coffee had me fired up and I started out way too hard.  Mentally, I was in a bad place, knowing that I still had another fifteen intervals to do.

What to do?  Quit?  I thought about it for a few seconds but quickly realized I would be better off just backing off the effort and fighting through.  That’s what I did.  It worked out quite well, because I was able to gradually increase my power towards the end of the interval set.  Overall, it turned out to be a good session – coach even told me, I crushed it …

I was definitely happy about how I balanced life and triathlon today.