Currently I am not exercising at the moment. I haven’t done so for the last week. The last time that I rowed was 6 days ago, my last weight training session was on December 2nd. I had hoped to row 10Km a day until the 24th December but I can’t. I am exhausted. I have pushed myself too hard and too far this year.

Everything came to a head last weekend. Due to time constraints I only managed 5Km on the Saturday. I thought no problem I will make it up on the Sunday. So I pushed myself and tried to row 15Km to make up for the missing 5Km. I ended up rowing just 10Km in total and I felt completely wiped out. My body didn’t want to continue. I felt shaky and weak.

After having competing at BRIC I had reduced my weight training (with my last weight session having been the Wednesday before the races), I thought this was enough and that I could go back to rowing 10Km a day. This is where I made my mistake. I jumped back into training too hard too soon after having competed. I should have taken some time off to recover. So now I am.

I need to let my body recover from the hard work that it has done this year. I will write about my accomplishments in an upcoming post but I think I deserve to rest. Now that I am off of work I should be able to destress fully (fingers crossed) and in the new year I should be able to hit the ground running.

My one regret is that I didn’t manage to complete the Holiday challenge. I had so wanted to row the 200Km, at this point I would have been happy with rowing 100Km, but I made it to only 88Km. I could squeeze out 12Km in the next week but I think I would be doing myself a disservice and I would likely cause myself more problems down the line and I do not want to be suffering from being “burned out” longer than I have to.