Howling at the Moon

"Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos into order, confusion into clarity.... It turns problems into gifts, failures into success, the unexpected into perfect timing, and mistakes into important events. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today and creates a vision for tomorrow." - Melodie Beattie

After 8 months and over 450 hours of swimming, biking, running, weight lifting, and practicing yoga, we're nearing the end of our last big volume training block. Five weeks until our goal race for the year.

Over the past two weeks, we've completed our final three lactate threshold tests, with the goal of using these results to help with pacing for race day. Although, these "tests" are simply sources of information that we can learn from and use to improve, it's hard not to see them as good/ bad triathlete benchmarks: Are we improving? How much? Is it as much as we thought/ wished/ wanted? Is all this effort worth it?

The results have varied: Some days Robyn has cut huge time and felt like absolutely everything clicked. Some days, Ray has seen big progress and been the faster one of our training duo. Some days we're simply consistent. Some days we're slower and frustration looms, just waiting for us to accept.

This morning we met at track for our 3 mile run test. Ray had one of her best runs of the year, while Robyn had one of her hardest -- but the memory of the day will be our companionship: running in dark, awaiting the sunrise, and howling at the full moon still high in the sky. Lots of big and small tests are present in our everyday lives, but for moments like these we are grateful.