MENTAL HEALTH TIP: DON’T FORGET TO FACTOR IN LIFE

These past couple of months I’ve gone through a big transition. My wife and I decided to pack our life into some boxes and relocate to the United States (this timely process is still ongoing) . A country we’ve both been dreaming of living in. It’s exciting, challenging and at the same time scary.

While going through this process I’ve tried to keep up with the same training schedule I did the years before. Those years the only stress or focus I had was the next training block or race. I easily managed 90+ hrs on the bike each month. That was the little bubble I was living in. Now all of the sudden I had so many things happening at the same time, which all needed attention. For the first time I had external added stressors and felt the consequences. I could physically feel my recovery was slower. My legs hurt for no reason. I had this foggy brain feeling as I tried to put everything in place. I had to take a step back to make space for this process to have the right balance.

Online you’ll find plenty of articles saying how great exercise is for relieving stress, but we don’t fall into this category. We specifically train to stress our bodies. By doing this daily our bodies adapt and with the right balance of stress vs recovery we get stronger, allowing us to add even more load/stress during the next phase.

So, my tip would be to take a little step back. Instead of doing the usual 3 days on, 1 day off training block, I did 2-on-1-off. As soon as I gave my body just this little bit of extra recovery time I recovered faster, had more mental energy to deal with all the decisions we had to make and felt healthier. In fact, I enjoyed training again when I finally started to feel more energized. Now, a couple of weeks or actually 2 months later, I am back to my usual 3-on-1-off blocks and not far-off the numbers I produced the years before. I will only start racing around March which gives me plenty of time to get back up to the level I was before.