I was talking to a friend the other day about how he woke up and felt weak and out of shape, then blasted a second place in the year’s first mountain race.

Yesterday I talked to another friend that was planning all day at on doing a super intense interval/time trial workout once he got home, then he got out there and decided it was a bad idea in the first five minutes. He has resolved to give it another shot today.

All of you understand where these guys are coming from because it happens with first-timer high schoolers and old-timer professionals. It seems rare that someone wakes up and races the race that they thought they would. If you are the kind of person that want’s to get to the bottom of it, then the evidence would leave you to believe that fitness is magic.

Or rather, you might conclude that you can’t conclude anything. Ever since I jumped to the next level of fitness (more than 12 hours a week and a year-round lifestyle) a couple of years ago, there has been this disconnect between what I assume is the norm and what I can actually do. These days, even when I’m “out of shape,” I still go out and conquer workouts that I never would have imagined possible a couple of years before.

Yesterday I woke up feeling like crap (too much “Takillya” the night before) and by 8:30pm I’d run two mountains over 2.5 hours on a busted ankle. Afterwards I looked back at the ridges and peaks and snow fields that I covered and laughed out loud.

Sometimes I think it’s incredible what we elite athletes can do when high fitness becomes the norm. Before I would look at a glacial valley and just see a trail with some parking, and these days I see a macroscopic terrain park unbound by normalized paths and markers and full of possibilities. I might think I’m headed out for a 45 minute recovery run, but somehow every time I do it ends up being a couple of hours with terrific views and sensations of accomplishment.

Expect the unexpected, I guess.

This entry was posted on Friday, June 19th, 2009 at 3:16 pm and is filed under Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.