Every month so far, I've shown progressive increases in performance. Better! Faster! Stronger! That came to a screeching halt in November. My motivation died, my performance decreased - the only indicator that increased was my level of frustration.

Let's start with the facts.

Heart rate. I've been able to get my heart rate up to near max if I wanted

to when doing intervals. This month, I struggled to get within 15 beats of max (about 90%).

Intervals. All year it's been "build up" - intervals get harder over the session. This month, they started out hard, even at low heart rates. And the
pattern was more "build up, then die" - the later intervals in a session felt hard, but my heart rate actually went down. I even abandoned one interval session part way through. Rollerski time trial. Slower by 45 seconds.

What happened? Excessive stress, of the non-training kind. Job-related stress was at an all time high as we started pulling together details for our 2003 plan. Jill's mom went into the hospital for what ended up being quintuple bypass surgery. My best friend from college died of cancer. We were stressing over new houses. Our neighbor died. Jill had a bad case of the flu. And during it all, I attempted to keep my training hours up.

Mistake.

If I had November to do over again, I'd have backed off my training. I'd have used shorter training sessions. I definitely would have reduced the number and intensity of interval sessions I did. As Torbjorn has said repeatedly to me, "If you can do two quality sessions, a distance session, and a strength session, you've had a good week." I should have taken that advice to heart. Instead, I tried to train through the stress and maintain my 8 hours a week schedule.

Second, I would have not been a slave to my heart rate monitor. Instead of trying to push myself to certain heart beat ranges, I should have just let perceived effort ("This feel HARD!") govern my quality sessions. If it felt hard, it WAS hard, regardless of heart rate. Torbjorn also suggested this.

If your life is increasing stressful and your training is going to hell, BACK OFF! Don't stress over your training!

Not to be totally negative, I set another PR (personal record) in a running time trial - so I'm still making progress, even during my off-month.

Did I mention I got the flu on the last day of the month? November was hell...