The other week I said to my self that it’s time to slowly get back to training after a good off-season resting period. And the next day I could feel my throat getting soar. I got tired and mentally ”clouded”. This is typical for signs when I’m beginning to get sick.

Nothing serious, not even a real man cold (i.e. I didn’t have to be driven to the hospital). But, it was more than enough to put my ”new beginning” on hold.

Normally I’m quite strict when it comes to nutrition, rest and hand hygiene. But during the last weeks I’ve let go of this. I’ve skipped my protein shakes, bananas and power naps. I’ve not used my Hygiene of Sweden (awesome stuff!) as frequent as usual. And may be my ”system” just relaxed after a long period of training and racing.

Now, I find this pretty frustrating. I really want to get back to some kind of structured training since it makes me feel better in so many ways. But since it’s out of my control I have accepted the situation and instead I’ve spent some time reflecting. And one day while driving my car to a meeting it struck me – in August I was riding my TT-bike on this road, but I felt weak and couldn’t complete the interval session that coach Oscar had put together for me. Instead I road a short easy session, stopped for a long coffee break and arrived home frustrated and told my wife ”I done as an athlete again, I feel tired and mentally clouded, and I wasn’t even close to completing todays session as planned”.

My guess is that most of us (tri)athletes experience periods of feeling sick, weak or just mentally low. Or why not lumbago or severe Achilles pain. We all get periods of illness or small ”injuries”.

If this occurs in off-season as for me now, it’s not too bad, but during key training periods or even during race season – that’s far more challenging and rarely a welcome experience.

Now to the good news: This year I had the season of my life – AND – I had periods of feeling sick, weak or just mentally low during this year. And lumbago 14 days before IM 70.3 European Championship nearly put me in a DNS.

This means that from now on when I have these short periods off a cold, lumbago or what ever reason there is for an unplanned break, I’ll remind my self: Calle – this is exactly what happened during 2018 – and it predicted an awesome race and an astonishing season!

I bet you also experience interruptions in your training for various reasons. I hope this short post can help you accept the situation and use it to rest and build motivation. It might be that you’re about to have the race of your life!

The force is still with you!

/Calle