Fighting in the jungle

What I love about our Triathlete Alliance, is not only do I learn so much from all of the postings, I get inspired for new posts. Thanks Wil.

Her great post, and they are all great, was about being concerned about the snipers that take out your training plans, not the big bombs that fall from the sky and you see a mile away. Wil, wrote about that famous axiom, "It's a jungle out there."

Sidenote: Out of curiosity I spent an hour just now researching the origin of this quote to no success.

This is really a post to massage some of the regrets Wil had about missing most of her swim and having her day screwed up because she got 'sniped' by the time thief (my paraphrase).

See, infantryman, grunts, don't use that phrase. I was a grunt for ten years. I spent a solid chunk of that in the south Pacific, (i.e. The Jungle) Grunts don't say it because not only is it self evident but because its more of an armchair saying than an actual boots on the ground saying. A grunt would use, "Its a jungle out there" as sarcasticly as they would, "SNAFU", "FUBAR" or "TARFU" (if you link over, read the second paragraph for definitions)

Grunts are trained to live in the jungle, trained to survive in the jungle. A grunt's training regimen is designed for them to do impossible things at the limits of their endurance. The entire goal of basic training and any combat school worth its weight is too push the grunt to the limit of their endurance and still function.

Now the switch over in my analogy to triathlon. A triathlete, specifically an Ironman distance triathlete like Wil is becoming, is training her body to function at or past the limits of her endurance, pushing her body to the point of mental and physical breakdown and then sustaining it for hours at a time. (In the terms of a soldier, days or weeks at a time).

Bombs fall. Snipers are out there. Uncle Murphy rides shotgun. Things happen in our daily lives that are counter productive to our training. Issues arise that steal our attention from what's important now, (i.e. Wil looking for a glove for thirty minutes instead of going to the pool or me spending an hour researching a stupid quote).

What our training allows us to do is push our 'Stress Envelope'. Yes a silent sniper took time away from Wil's training and frustrated her and pushed her out of her comfort zone but she didn't blow it off, she still went, she 'soldiered on'. By surviving that issue she increased her Stress Envelope just a little bit more.

There will be other issues that she will overcome that will push that envelope out more and more until Ironman Wisconsin, but by then the envelope is big enough to fit all of that day into it no problem.