On Overcoming Road Blocks

Any athlete will tell you that sometimes things just don't go your way.  It rains. You get sick.  Injuries occur.  Motivational blocks hit you.  Bad luck happens.  But for me, the main difficulty in any obstacle to training is the mental challenge that comes with it. We're trained to put so much value into our workouts, whether easy or difficult, that to sit out on any of them, especially in a professional setting, is no easy task.

Junior year of college, I sprained my ankle in October, got mono in November, and crashed and ended up with a concussion in January.  (We called it the trifecta from hell.) It was the season of bad luck, but out of the struggles of trying to train and race around sickness and injury, I learned to read my body and train based on how I feel. By the end of the season, I thought I would always be able to make the right call when it came to training while being sick or injured.

Or so I thought.

It turns out, each new season brings with it a refresher course on "making the right call".  Even though I learned some solid lessons the year of the trifecta, I've figured out that the first (or maybe even second) time I get sick/injured in a new season, those lessons aren't always the easiest to remember. 

That's when we need our teammates and coaches and family and our subconscious to remind us that not only is the training important, but the recovery is part of our job too. And it's better to miss a couple of days than be sick for a couple of weeks.

So, for stubborn, anxious, high strung people like me, here's a list of wonderful things to do while you are quarantined on the couch:

• Read a book. (or four)
• Learn to knit. (I did that when I had mono and made 12 scarves in 7 weeks. Your friends and family will absolutely love it.)
• Take advantage of the steam room. (It seriously helps with coughs/sore throats/congestion, no matter how claustrophobic it is. Just pretend you're in Hawaii.)
• Blow through entire seasons on Netflix. (Highly recommended: New Girl, Criminal Minds, and Gilmore Girls.)
• Stretch and roll. (You might as well be helping our your muscles some way while you're resting.)
• Figure out how to perfect fruit smoothies. (Recipe ideas here.)
• Color. (Kid you not, it's pretty therapeutic.)
• Call a friend - or your mom - to catch up. (Sometimes all you need is a conversation to take your mind off of being sick. And who better to do it with than someone who loves you right?!)
• Take deep breaths. (Yes, you're missing a workout right now. But would that workout be doing you any good if you coughed your way through it? Probably not.)

Basically, you can't get over the roadblocks in training by forcing your way through them, no matter what level of skiing you are at.  You just have to be patient and make the harder choice to wait until you're in the clear. And we all need reminding sometimes.