Listening...

Something my wife tells me I am not good at.. haha.. but seriously Listening is so important. We will all usually "Hear" but the same message is not coming across as in Listening. Now I know we all have our agendas and it's a busy world these days and trying to get everything done in the allowed 24 hours is sometimes impossible which is where our Hearing overrides our Listening.

Now there are many situations where we all Hear, such as the birds chirping, the freakn` roosters crowin` at 4:30-6:30 every am 2 house down from me, and hearing your kids tell you about this or that. Now the Listening situations are like your lost and someone is giving you directions to get back on track, Your Listening! or a drill Sargent yelling out orders to you, your Listening! But really fellow athletes I'm talking about Listening, ARE YOU LISTENING??

As athletes we engage in many hours of exercise and training for days at a time. We all have family and personal lives so fitting everything in is hectic along with getting the best adequate rest and sleep recovery. Now when your body starts to talk to you about things like slowing down, needing more rest, feeling fatigue, and/or no motivation to train along with some others we usually Hear this but for some reason we don't Listen!

Hearing our bodies but not Listening to them will eventually lead us to illness and/or injuries. The body can only take so much abuse and then will have to over adapt and shut you down in some way, shape or form. The being the case, many injuries can be prevented by just Listening to our bodies and know when your Hearing the signs!

Example: Currently training for my Olympic race on May 28th I have had my training schedule set and it has been working great and this was to be the last week of really pushing hard and then tapering for the next 2 weeks but as I was beginning to Hear my body to tell me to slow down I was not wanting to Listen.

Come on JohnnyTri body, you only got this week, you can do it, hang in there! Your tough!

Well, JohnnyTri body said OK tough guy how about this, I'm tired and don't have the energy and need rest/sleep so try that without me!

Yikes! Didn't happen this week. My body really took over and as I began to Listen and cut my training back my body has come around this week. (Oh yea, during my training schedule this was my week to cut back but due to the timing of the Oly tri I was attempting to push it another week, HA, didn't work)

So the Moral of the Story fellow Athletes, is LISTEN to your wonderful Bodies! Take the rest days, take the off days, get your sleep and Listen to your Hearing as it is telling you what you really need to know! Because if you don't, when your body starts to bring on injuries you will have to come all the way down to H-town to see me so I can fix you with my new sports techniques! :)

rockon`

PS. training today is another 1 mile open water swim before the rain rolls in this afternoon and tomorrow will be a 23 mile bike ride with some rolling hills (last 30 mins of ride at race pace) then followed by a 5 mile run! Then REST!