Justin's Mindset During These Times

In the spirt of social distancing, I’ve been hunkering down at home and spending a lot of time with my wife and dog. No doubt I am disappointed that a lot of my races are being postponed and the the future is uncertain for me as a professional athlete. That being said, I'm still training hard and making the best of this situation by keeping to myself and continuing training in the hopes that things will get better sooner rather than later. A big part of that is not interacting with people and “flattening the curve.” I’m doing everything in my power to aid in that process and if we all band together and stay at home, hopefully the world can get back to a place of normalcy in the coming weeks. 

In the meantime, my coaches and I have had to pivot our strategy. Seeing as though we will likely not be back on the race course until August at the earliest, the total volume of my program and general intensity has to take a step back. Our hands are a little bit forced on the swim side of things with all the pools/ gyms shutting down. Similar to the discussions that we had around visiting the Boardman Wind Tunnel in February, the bike is my biggest area for improvement and I’ll use this time to “close the gap” as my coaches are saying. That means some super high intensity cycling blocks with focused intervals targeting my weaknesses. The other day was a first step in that process where I did 10:00 of intervals to start the session around 430w and then a 25:00 effort around 275w. 

During this stressful and uncertain time, all we can do is focus on the positives. Being negative or sad about lost opportunities does not help anyone here. So I am urging my coached athletes and followers to keep their heads up, focus on getting better and staying away from others. If we band together (from a distance) we can emerge from this pandemic stronger as a community and as individual athletes.