Fitness Anxiety

Sincerely thank you to everyone for their comments, tweets, texts and calls on the last post and my major let down of a weigh in. I really appreciate the encouragement and suggestions!

I've gotten past my crappy weigh in from this weekend and MOVED ON. Sure, I'm still disappointed that it seems like all my hard work last week was for not, but I have more hard work to look forward to this week.

Last week, I was dealing with a bit of fitness anxiety. I was anxious about the upcoming spin class last Friday and half-marathon in February.

I like trying new things. I'm pretty good about "putting myself out there" but that doesn't come without reservations. When I decided to go to the spin class, I had so many anxious thoughts. Would I be able to keep up? Would I fit comfortably on the bike? What if it's crowded? What if I'm the fattest person there? In the end none of that mattered and I enjoyed the class. It was just my my mind over thinking every thing.

I've been stressing about the half-marathon since I registered. I have done one other half-marathon. It was the Country Music Nashville event from the popular Rock n Roll race series. This race is huge. There are something like over 30,000 participants? Huge! They aren't strict about the 4 hour time limit (my time was 4:18 in 2009) and when you register they ask you your pace and pre-assign you to corrals. Then, at the start of the race, they do wave starts, where every few minutes they release another corral.

Well, unbeknownst to me, the Mercedes event is very small. Tiny. Minuscule. Get it? Only 3,500-4,000 do the half. That's 90% smaller then the size of my last half! And when they didn't ask my pace on the registration I freaked out a bit since I had no idea what to expect at the start line. I ended up calling. It's just one big start (cue: fear of being trampled). They do have corrals for the different pace times (thank God), but still my irrational fear of being trampled is still there. Have I ever told you I was trampled once? Oh, yeah I was. At a concert. Back in the day we lined up all day long to be the first one into general admission rock shows and be front row. Well, at this one venue you had to RUN, up a flight of stairs to get to the mainstage area. Being the clumsy person I am, I fell and people freaking trampled me. Yeah. So fear of being trampled is alive and well in my mind.

My other anxiety ridden thought? Not finishing - or being the last one to finish. I have nothing from my training that would indicate I won't finish within the prescribed 4 hour time limit (my 10 mile walk was a 17:45 pace), but when I constantly read things like, "the half marathon finish line will close promptly at 11:03 am" it puts a lot of pressure on me mentally. It's not even the fact of not getting the medal or whatever other swag they give to official finishers. I just don't want them to deny me crossing that finish line and saying I completed 13.1 miles. Then, looking at the finisher's times last year for the half doesn't help one bit. The slowest person last year in my age group finished in 3:51:20. See? Anxiety.

I know in the end, none of this will matter. However, for the next several weeks it will. Only 4 more "long" walks to go. I'll do 12 miles this week. Then 8 as a recovery and the last two weeks will just be 6 to give my body time to rest (I got off schedule from Christmas, so there should be another 12 miler in there, but I'll be fine).

So, does anyone else suffer from "fitness" anxiety? Or other anxiety in relation to other aspects of your weight or weight loss?