Another new moon, another first of the month, another Monday.

All traditionally associated with a new opportunity. A chance for a fresh start – and don’t we all need those from time to time…

Today is also my eldest son’s 32nd birthday. I haven’t seen him for many years. The rift between us is huge, and I hope not unbreachable. One day we will both need to take a big breath, place trust in other and try for a new start. I hope that day comes.

This morning I am sitting in the gym car park waiting for the place to open. I have a session with my personal trainer then an hour in the pool. Having felt stale for a couple of weeks I am giving the training a shake up. Hence Craig the PT who is whipping me into shape.

I have also stopped using my Ironman coach as I have been very irritating to teach lately. So caught up with work and training and making my relationship whole that I haven’t reported to him as agreed. Silly of me to waste my money, his skills and experience at a time when I simply can’t make any more time to report on what I am up to. So I am going to have to slow down, reflect, decide whether or not to patch the coach relationship – which is far less important than the one with my son and my partner. Meantime make the best of my new start.

It’s cold this morning; would have been nice to stay snuggled in bed, but new beginnings don’t happen without effort and commitment and imagination.

So I will take a big breath, clear my mind of recent past experiences and plunge anew into the amazing gift that is the fresh chance.

It’s three in the morning – the alarm is due to ring in an hour and a quarter but my body clock is running ahead of time. Over the past three weeks I consistently waken well before I need to and can’t get back to sleep. What to do with this gift of wakefulness? Yesterday I drove to a local beach with the intention of running for an hour before going to my regular gym training session. I’d never been to this beach in the dark. It was high tide and the sea lapped at the base of the grassy bank that edged it. The footpath was irregular and the light not good enough to allow me to feel sure-footed and safe. I drove instead to the gym and spent forty minutes in the car park with my laptop watching a DVD on how to swim more efficiently.

Staying in bed and struggling to sleep again is not an option. My restlessness disturbs my partner who then lies awake next to me. If I stay in the house my toy poodle wakes and cries to come inside and start her day. The only way to make useful my time is to leave home and get some exercise or writing done. This morning I am again in the car park of the gym, writing some blogs and updating my training diary. This afternoon I pick up my bike from the shop where it is being serviced, so tomorrow in the early hours I will ride. The streets feel safer in the early morn as traffic is minimal.
Ironman training doesn’t allow polite, normal hours. My day starts well before the alarm goes off. Todaymy training is:

0400 update training diary, plan the next week.
Drive 30 minutes to gym.
0500 plyometrics 30 minutes
0530 lower body weights and resistance exercises 30 minutes
0600 RPM class (exercise bike) 50 minutes
0650 Core exercises 15 minutes
0705 leave for work.
1300 (lunch break) to pool or beach for an hour swim.

At 1800 – 2030h there is specific triathlon training with club. I’m usually too tired for this as the very early starts mean I need to go to bed early.

Tomorrow it’s plyometrics, stretching, lower body weights and a ninety minute swim with an hour on the bike either on the road or the stationary trainer. This is fit around a 60-70 hour working week with every night and weekend on call at the moment. Add in a relatively new relationship with a man with children and it’s obvious I’m busy…

Life’s busy, rewarding, and at times demands more than I feel I can give, but I wouldn’t have it any other way. I might not make the podium in Ironman, palliative care doctoring or relationships, but I will work hard at all of them, and reap the rewards of dedication, commitment and endurance.

And one day I’ll sleep all the way until the alarm rings and wake rested.

I completed Ironman New Zealand in 2007, and finished fourth to last. At the time I became inspired to do the race (early 2006) I couldn’t swim, hadn’t been on a bike for 22 years and had hip pain when I tried to run. However these small issues did not get me down… I got up at 4 almost every morning, swam, cycled and ran for 16 months and got fit enough to line up with the big guys (and small women) on race day.

All that training on a minimal base meant that when the race was over I had had enough endurance training to last a lifetime… Completely ‘over’ exercise, I sold my bike and wet-suit, hung up the running shoes and went back to being an armchair athlete.

Now four and a half years later I have to start all over again. Or so I thought. I had forgotten about muscle memory, and about the neurological pathways that develop when a body is trained. Remember how to ride a bike? Of course… We can walk away from our bicycle for thirty years, but still recall how to balance on two wheels, how to circle those pedals, and (especially if we have been ‘over the bars’) how to feather the brakes.

Our brains have stored those memories, and it takes little to reactivate those nerve pathways. A few sessions on the bike, and though we have to work to get aerobic fitness and endurance back, the basic movement patterns are working fully again.

The same in the gym. Weight training gives much faster results in someone whose body has once been well muscled. The body ‘remembers’ how to build those muscles, and does so faster than expected. Yoga poses, running drills, bilateral breathing, Bulgarian split squats – if you’ve mastered them once before your body will remember the way to performing them again even after a long lay-off.

So I’m back to 04:15 wake up calls, back to gym workouts, 90 minute swim sessions and long hours on the bike. The muscles remember, the pathways are being etched deeper. I can now recall the deep fatigue but paradoxically energised feeling after mega-workouts. My shape is changing, as are my appetites. And back is the sense that despite the horrors of constant on-call work, non-collegial colleagues, and world disasters, that there is an area of my life where I have control. The life of tri – of try, try, try.

There is such joy in having a plan, in working towards it, and in knowing that my body knows what it needs to do, is remembering what comes next, and if I care for it will take me stepwise to my goal.

Swim, bike, run, rest, eat well, relax. That is the plan. Fun on Ironman day and during the journey to the day is the goal. Training and recovery are the steps that will take me there.

Now I just need to reacclimatise my butt to hours in the saddle. Sadly that pathway seems to have been erased…

Isn’t it magic to have friends? People who listen, who encourage, who challenge us and keep us true.

Vaughan and I had several friends over for dinner last night – two nurses, a police inspector, a director of television documentaries and an art teacher at a local high school.

We drank wine, ate beef stew with garden salad – not a common combination but in tune with the changing season. After a very warm start to autumn the cold is beginning to bite.

We broke bread together, supped wine and listened to one another. All left the table full of food and emptied of stress. In a world of fear and disaster and want we can each find peace one table-full at a time.

Let’s eat.

One of the things I find most difficult about training is the lack of linear progression. Even without overtraining it is in the nature of physical change that improvement happens faster some times and slower others.

Swimming is where I notice it most.  One day I can swim easy for 2000 metres then do some short sharp bursts, speed drills and kicking before leaving the pool refreshed and very pleased with my progress.  Other days I leave feeling demoralised because a kilometre swim felt just too hard, and my rotation didn’t feel right, and I struggled with coordination while the other swimmers seemed to be having a far easier time of it.

Keeping a training diary helps keep these blips in perspective.  Often after a period of slow gain there comes a burst of improvement where gains made seem enormous.  When I first started swimming again after a gap of four years I could barely swim 25 metres without feeling like my lungs would burst. Three weeks later I diairised my great delight at swimming 400 metres without stopping.  Wow!  Being able to return to my training log and recall the feeling that I could do ANYTHING having made such a great improvement helps me keep things in perspective when my performance seems stagnant.

Evolution of fitness, shape and ability in all fields comes in leaps and bounds, and is not the steady, ever- forward progression that we would like to see. To work through the hard times takes courage, commitment and the ability to see the big picture.

Keep a diary.

Review it often.

See how far you have come.

And enjoy the changes. They make all the hard work worthwhile.  

To many, total abstinence is easier than perfect moderation.  Saint Augustine

I must say, I agree with Augustine. Moderation is hard.

I have got where I have in life by sustaining a single focus, often over long periods, and often at the expense of other, competing interests. It may not surprise that I have been married more than once – lost the same 20 kg over and over again. When the focus on daily life is subsumed to the newest obsession, life might fall by the wayside.

In 2012, I line up for my second Ironman race. The race is 343 days away today, but already I am out the door at 4.30 each morning to swim, bike, run and gym my way to the start line. The focus, dedication and hard work are essential – without them I may as well withdraw my entry fee and sit on the couch. This time though I will be kinder to my workmates, kinder to my partner, and kinder to myself.

Somewhere, deep inside, I must find moderation, take a broader outlook and keep the rest of my life on track as I pursue my dream.

Moderate does not mean mediocre – it means excelling in more than one area at once.

That is my aim for the rest of my life.

How do the rest of you cope with moderation?

I had the strangest phone call a month ago.

A cousin phoned ... I hadn’t heard from him in years ... to tell me that a woman I’d never met had found my mother’s headstone under weeds in her garden.  The woman (Carol) had gone through the telephone book looking for anyone with the surname Roche so she could return the stone to someone who knew the person commemorated on it.

Mum ... Pamela Joan Roche died in 1976, leaving 10, 12 and 14 year old daughters. Her ashes were buried in a cemetery fifty kilometres from Carol’s house. As far as I knew, her grave had not been violated.

A funny thing, while it was just a headstone it felt like a piece of my mother. My sisters and I have no material keepsakes of mum. She is in us in varying degrees. My sister Tracey has her ability to see the good in everyone, to forgive and forget. Shelley looks physically the most like mum, who left nothing but her genes to us. No letters, few photographs. No clothes, furniture, house, vehicles. No jewellery, no books. I am not much like her at all, except in a reckless early life and a tendency to try all the things I was warned away from at least once. These corporeal reminders are all we have.  On her death she was otherwise effectively erased from the physical world.

And now this, a concrete reminder, something to hold onto, was found in a stranger’s garden. Bizarre…

I phoned Carol. Some detective work showed the headstone hadn’t been stolen, but forgotten by mum’s sister who had it removed and a new, less weathered version made. When she moved house she forgot to take the old headstone with her, and it remained, lost in the overgrowth till a gardener found it and tracked down someone who would retrieve it and love it again.

Now I have something tangible, solid, which has both my mother’s, sisters’ and my name on it. It will sit for a while in my garden and then travel to stay with each of my sisters in turn.

Long bereft we will have something solid, tangible that brings her back, in the smallest and strangest of ways to us.