Grateful

April is complete and it was a solid month of training for me. . . In fact, by BIGGEST month ever and I am so grateful that I made it through while pushing to new levels and still avoiding injury or dragging along too much fatigue into this month. Grateful for my friends, job and schedule for helping me get r done. Somehow it was more of a challenge/reward to pull off a solid month of training than just a single day race.

Working on your limiters is the fastest way to get to “the next level”. . . whatever the next level is for your goals. In sport and especially multisport it is always a good idea to work on your weakest link to achieve a better balance…an obvious limiter. A limiter can also be sport specific like the technique skills of running posture, position of your elbows when paddling or the sweep of your foot while peddling on the bike.

For me, I had to own up to the fact that I was racing too much! It had become my biggest limiter to my racing goals. Sounds strange but Monique and I had a few stretches of racing five or six weekends in a row of “sprint” distance races. Trying to recover from the weekend and stay rested for the next makes it difficult to log in the time and miles during the week. Racing in itself however is great training and that works for sprint distance races! Expensive, intensive and a ton of fun but this year I am focusing on a bigger picture and building the volume. This year, I only had one race in April (Oceanside 70.3) and then focused on building a bigger base while keeping the quality around recovery and key sessions in focus.

The challenge of racing and training is and always will be with myself and one thing is for sure...Slater 2009 would drop Slater 2008 in the first lap of any race...if volume is any indication of fitness I am looking forward to kicking my own @ss in some future races!

With April in the books I am looking forward to jumping back into some races again. This weekend we are missing the XTERRA West CUP and heading up to Napa for a wedding. It promises to provide some solid recovery and good times with some old friends! When we get back Monque and I are jumping into the XTERRA Del Valle race and it will be my first race in 5 weeks. FIVE WEEKS! That’s a record for me and I have a ton of motivation going into it!

After three years of not doing the entire series of XTERRA or never doing enough races to qualify for Nationals I have decided to give it a go this year and two weeks after Del Valle I am going to be flying out to race the XTERRA SouthEast CUP in Alabama. Hello humidity! I am still not sure what other XTERRA races I will do but I know I will be grateful if I can get into one more and/or qualify for Nationals this year. The Nationals date was the same day as the California Multisport finals but after talking with Paul and Karen I found that the CalMultisport race was changed (grateful!) and now I can still make all of the CalMultisport races and the National Xterra race. Stoked! Hoping I can hold on the wheels until then and so grateful for a solid few weeks so far… Now its on to Napa for some grapes.