Monday, February 20, 2017

Colorado Springs, CO

Well updating this in a timely manner got away from me this time. Thankfully or not there hasn't been a lot to report on. I met with our nutritionist and sports psychologist this past week just to touch base and meet in person. Both are astoundingly nice individuals and I look forward to working with them more in the future. Today I also had a meeting with Simon my coach over coffee and that I found to be very productive. I haven't had the chance to really talk with him much one on one so it was nice being able to take an hour and go over a vast amount of information. Working with him has been going very well and so far I feel like the training he prescribes has been very good and is setting me up to have my best season to date.

The past couple weeks I have been dealing with a lot of chest and intercostal tightness which has been rocking me mildly. It has been making deep breathing difficult and I would get a pain in my ribs any time I would do a hard effort from breathing heavily. I brought this up to Ricky one of the interns in the gym and he gave me some exercises to try and loosen my pectoral muscles and that has really been beneficial but the one thing he suggested was diaphragmatic breathing. I have always been a chest breather and never really thought of breathing as a way to help performance. It took some time to get used to doing this but I really have noticed the benefits. My heart rate seems to have lowered slightly, I feel like I am getting deeper more fulfilling breaths in, and it has really helped with my anxiety. Any time I feel a panic attack coming on or my anxiety creeping in I calm down by focusing on breathing out of my belly. This technique alone has been a life saver. I was still having the rib pain and I brought it up to Anthony one day while I was in the gym and he took time out of his day to help me figure out what exactly was going on. From what I can tell it seem that one of the muscles in my abdomen is really tight and might be pulling on one of my ribs....I think? It makes sense to me because after palpating around we were able to find a very tender muscles on the left side of my abdomen. The past couple days I really have focused on stretching that muscles and trying to loosen it up. So far I haven't experienced any of the rib pain I had been having but the muscle is still tender.

I have always invested a lot of my effort to trying to improve on the bike. Now having dedicated time off the bike to work on strength and conditioning has really highlighted my lack of flexibility and mobility so every day I have put in an extra effort to go down to the gym and go through a foam rolling and stretching routine to work on my weaknesses. I don't know if I have really improved too much but more found how messed up my body has become in different areas. I am excited to see the improvements I make as I continue to work on theses areas of fitness and more excited to see how they benefit me on the bike.

The weather here is supposed to cool off for the next week but it could easily change. The weather seems to be a bit bipolar here. I am looking forward to the work outs these upcoming weeks and to putting more time on my TT bike in efforts to get ready for nationals.


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