Ballance life with sport is hard

This week started with two assessments that had to be finished: one on Monday and another on Thursday. This meant a lot of my rest time was spent behind the laptop. Can you even call that resting?

This week was one of the hottest ones yet, with temperatures of 30+°C every day and not dropping below 22°C even at night. This made sleeping a horror. I fell asleep between 11:45 PM and 1:00 AM because I couldn’t sleep earlier due to the heat. This meant poorer recovery than one would have liked, with sleep still between 6-8 hours. It didn’t help that there was stress from delivering good work on the assessments I had to complete. The one on Monday was easier because most of the work was already done, but this meant I had to start the one for Thursday right after finishing the first. I had to write a 2000-word report about a 13-minute interview and do a DIEP (Describe, Interpret, Evaluate, Plan) self-reflection.

I started doing the groundwork for the self-reflection on Tuesday because I had to wait at the bike shop for most of the day. My bike was in the shop for some final checks before the Xterra here in Australia. It took way longer than expected, but that only meant I got far with the reflection. After that, I still had to do a 2.5-hour bike ride and a 6x800m run at race pace. THIS was not FUN. I was already a bit tired from the whole day and started my training around 5ish.

Wednesday was school and a long swim. For everyone wondering, yes, I did train on Monday, but that was a nice and easy day. I hoped Wednesday would be easy as well, and I planned to finish the reflection paper. For some reason, I swam in the morning, went to school for a 3-hour session, and felt empty. I went home, cooked dinner, and didn’t finish writing the paper. Ouch…

So, Thursday, my training schedule said a 3-hour ride. F1, yes, F1 or better yet, the AUSGP started today, but I had to write the paper and didn’t go out for a ride before finishing it. I finished the paper around 2:30 PM and went straight out for the ride. No rest, just straight to training. Let me tell you, writing 2000 words and checking it for mistakes and stuff might sound like just sitting behind a laptop with no effort, but it is a big ask for your cognitive muscles and can exhaust you. The first hour on the bike was lovely, but the last 40 minutes were a pain.

Friday meant no more thinking about assessments and school projects, but here's where it got tricky. I had a 4-day park pass for the F1 and really wanted to enjoy it, but with more intensive training sessions peeking around the corner, it was taking its toll. I rushed the session a bit too much.

Also, Friday started with an early wake-up, breakfast, and then jumping into the pool for a 3200m swim, followed by a 1-hour run with some big 5x1km efforts and 5x200m sprints. I came home around 12:30, had lunch, and ate everything already. By 1:30 PM, I was out the door and heading to Albert Park to watch Formula 1 Practice 2 and some supercars racing around. It was quite a journey getting there, taking more than an hour with no rest after training.

Finally we go to the track! When you get there, you walk around a lot to see the track from different locations. The first thing I felt when I arrived was goosebumps, or as we call it in the Netherlands, "kippenvel." THE SOUND from the CARS was really something I had never experienced before. Around 6:30 PM, I left Albert Park. All the trams were packed, so I walked back a good 2.5km to the train station. Luckily, I got myself some dinner leftovers.

Saturday was another crazy day, maybe even worse, with the hottest day of the week hitting 38 degrees. I started with a 4.2km swim with a lot of fast 100m intervals. After that, I felt empty, but I knew I had to get home quickly and get on the bike for a 1.5-hour ride with 8x5-minute race pace efforts. I felt terrible during the ride, the whole time just feeling empty, but I had to get it done. After that, I had lunch and rushed out to see the qualifiers, with no time to rest, just like the day before. I wanted to be at Albert Park around 1:00 PM but got there at 2:50 PM, maybe a bit earlier—I can’t really remember.