now what?: post-race edition

Well, I don’t know what you do.

What I’ve learned to do is get back in the saddle as quickly as possible, given any injuries, illnesses, etc.

So this week, I started over again. Same plans, new starting points. On Kettlebell Maximorum, I started with double 18kgs. Yesterday, sets of 3 single snatches. Today, sets of 1 double KB clean and press (CP) and 2 double KB front squats (FSQ).

I did a grand total of 12 reps of CP. 24 FSQ.

And damn, was that fucking heavy. And hard. TWELVE. REPS.

I wasn’t blowing or breathless, but I sure felt that weight. 36kg over my head.

I don’t do well without structure of some sort to my workouts, without some sort of goal. Even if that goal is just “try out this plan and get to the end.” (In fact, that’s usually the main goal I have year round. Races have, up til recently, been a rarity.)

I’m feeling a bit at loose ends after the fell run. The last goal before that was gearing up for the London HEMA Open in May, and when I finished that, I went straight into the race plan. I had, in fact, already been building my running base.

I’d thought that I would make a similar switch now and go back into sword mode, but with the busy schedule this autumn (book releases, family in town, tour, travel, teaching, multiple book deadlines), I won’t be able to spar as much as I want. Luckily, the next competition I really have in mind is may 2026, the next London HEMA Open. Dialing in at the beginning of the year sounds doable, and of course, I’ll keep attending weekly classes as often as I can for the rest of this year.

With the increased pressure on my deadlines and everything else, I’m also left without as much time to think about workouts. That doesn’t mean I’m not going to do them. It also doesn’t mean I’ll necessarily do less. It just means that I want to spend less time thinking about them. Autopilot. And not so much intensity that I’m losing the steam I need to be functional elsewhere. Luckily, I have a plan that has worked pretty well for that—the one that I’ve been doing. Though there are other things I know I wanted to experiment with, I just don’t have the bandwidth to trial and error new programming. With a program I already know, I just plug in the new weights, new distances, and go.

I made the mistake of shacking up with a long distance runner, though, and she signed up for a marathon next year. I’m not saying I’m gonna do it!! but we did both observe that my current long run distance is quite close to the 20 mi max that most marathon training plans cap out at… and as I was doing some bujo stuff yesterday (yes, I have a bullet journal, no it is not pretty, it really is just hand to brain to hand processing) and I realized in terms of physical goals, I could either work on getting faster as I’d originally set as my intention this year (in a low key way). Or…I could try to get to 20 miles as my new longest run. I mean. It’s only 4 miles away? Really more like 3.5. With 15 weeks left in the year, that sounds enormously feasible, unfortunately. And if I can get to 20 mi…why not try the marathon?

But that is a question for future!cherae and I do not want to complicate my life, as I said.

The heaviness of the weights today was a bit disheartening. Back to those unreasonable expectations we have of ourselves. I felt like I should be stronger, but that’s because I’m coming off of a program with a weight that I’m very familiar with. Actually, it’s not until I type this that I realise—this is the heaviest weight I’ve ever lifted over my head for more than a single rep test! Let alone TWELVE.

I started out doing e2mom (every 2 minutes on the minute), then dropped to every 2.5 minutes, then every 3 minutes. The initial pace was certainly ambitious and I knew it, but I wanted to see where I was. It didn’t last long. Not because I was gassed but because I definitely knew I couldn’t keep up the pace. After you’ve been doing this for a while, you can tell that before you’re already too far blown. As it was, toward the end, I could feel my bad shoulder starting to talk to me but I was able to finish out my last couple sets comfortably. My reward for letting experience guide me and not ego (look, it’s taken a long time for ego to lose on the regular, these wins are valuable). And I managed to run today, too, an easy 5k that felt much stronger and more fluid than the 2mi shakeout (shake…in?) that I did last week.

There’s a difference between pushing yourself and being stupid. And you don’t need to push yourself every time you come to the plate, even if you are training for something specific. There are valuable moments to burn a little harder, and you have to weigh them in relation to everything else going on in your life and your training. Right now, coming off of that race and heading into a new phase of training, a new training plan, new weights—now is not the time to push myself. There will be time for that later, when I’m more recovered, more used to the feeling of this weight overhead.

For now, I’m back in learning mode. How does this weight feel, where is it messing up my form, okay, let’s slow down and focus on fixing that, okay, how do i feel a day later? Can i do my run right after, or is that too much? Well let’s dial it back then, because the run is still important. Oh, hey, this feels pretty good. Yeah, this is good, we can do this again. Let’s go.