Blah

That pretty much defines my skating lately.  Blah.

I'm not excited about workouts.  I skip workouts on flimsy excuses, and when I do get to the oval, I often quit before I'm even halfway through what I had planned to do.  My skater friends in Milwaukee are on ice, skating hard and doing time trials, and I have no desire to be there. I'm going to Salt Lake in two weeks for a masters training camp, and I'm hoping to get some technique advice out there while avoiding actually having to work hard.

I think I'm having a skating mid-life crisis, and it sucks.

I'm not sure I can blame it on the thyroid, although I have had to adjust my one med again (I'm now back up to my usual dose, after having had to cut it in half for a while).  So I really shouldn't be hypo, but I still feel...blah...when I skate.  I have no desire to plan my next month's workouts, and I'm actually kind of glad that the oval is closing for the inline season next week.

I'm really not sure what's going on.  Could be I'm a bit burned out; I've been skating hard 11 months of the year for 10 years.  Maybe I'm slightly overtrained, although my good ice season last year would seem to argue against that.  Stress?  It is, after all, the beginning of the school year.  Physical stuff, whether thyroid or something else?  My body is definitely not what it was 5 years ago!  Mental stuff, like the fallout from two-and-a-half years of frustrating skating while I tried to diagnose what turned out to be hypothyroidism, followed by three summers of dipping thyroid levels and resulting frustrating and lengthy med-tuning, not to mention a sporadic heart arrhythmia that likes to appear in races?  It certainly has been challenging trying to keep the appropriate mental attitude when I never know what to expect physically.  Or maybe I'm just getting old and lazy.  I turn 49 in a couple of weeks, and while that's not really "old," it certainly has implications for my physical and mental state (just ask the Hubster about moody perimenopausal women).  I don't know, but I do know that I'm just not interested in doing anything that's "hard" right now, whether it's working out, stretching, cleaning the house, or improving my diet (the fact that dinner the past three nights has been a very large bowl of Count Chocula cereal should tell you something).

So my plan?  Well, I've thought about it a lot.  If I'm simply lazy and out of shape and I take it easy for the next 5 weeks before the oval opens for the ice season--well, then I'll just start the ice season fat, happy, well-rested, and a bit more out of shape.  On the other hand, if I try to get myself in gear and do some hard dryland workouts in the next few weeks and  I'm actually overtrained or even just burned out--well, then I'll start the ice season in an even deeper hole, and probably cranky as Hell to boot.  And no one wants that.

So my plan, if you can call it that, is to take it easy between now and November 9, when the oval opens for the ice season.  Do fairly minimal workouts, relax, don't stress about it.  Try not to outgrow my skinsuit, but don't worry too much about my diet (although I may try to avoid replacing the now-empty box of Count Chocula). And hope that something--my Salt Lake trip, or some time off, or the opening night of the ice season--fires up my passion again.

Because I don't want to be "blah" about skating.  I want to be excited about it, fired up about it, obsessed by it.  You might say "try a different sport; that will rekindle your passion."  But I don't want a different sport.  Skating is my "thing;" it's what I love, and it's what I've worked damn hard to get better at.  And I just want it  to be as as exciting and obsessing and all-consuming as it used to be.

That's not too much to ask, is it?