Liquid food and enforced laziness

I went for a night jog with Logan last week. We only did about 2.5km around a small park, but it was to try out a lead and follow approach, and see if I could run at his pace. While I didn't race away, I did hold a good pace and kept it up for the whole time, only being distracted by the blind bugger behind me potentially going off-course due to his following-by-ear. A new method required, which we will trial on Thursday. We need a safe and non-annoying method as we're going to be using it for hours as we traverse 19km of mountain roads. Thankfully we have a bit of time up our sleeves before it happens. After 2.5km on grass at a steady pace, I was starting to feel my shins, but it was a very manageable pain.

On Friday however, doing a short jog to my lunchtime torture session, my shins flared up real quick. Sadly, this was the day Tracey had decided to do running drills. 50m jaunts doing all manner of hop, skip, frog march, high knees, butt kicks and other weird walks straight from the Department of Silly Walks. About half way through my legs were in agony, but I pushed on. Why? Well, I need to know if they will explode, get even more sore, or just reach a point and hang there. I don;t want to find out half way up a mountain that the answer is explode! So I did the rest of the session, keeping up, but not rocketing along, and the pain held. It was sore, very sore, the worst my legs have been in fact, but it tells me that when I get to that stage of pain, it's not going to get a lot worse, nor is it going to snap my legs in half. It's an awful pain tho, and one I do not like. A combination of more training and some foot-doctor visits should help, hopefully.

The weekend was to be filled with activity, sailing, bike rides, hill walks and more. However, sailing was cancelled (despite the fantastic weather) and I spent most of the day being lazy instead. On Sunday Logan said he'd melt in the rain, and cancelled the ride. The hill walk was cancelled too, except it was replaced with a circuit session in the garage. Amanda, her 2 girls, me and my girl were under the instruction of Tracey for almost an hour. 10 stations, 45 seconds on, 10 seconds off. 2 loops, then a 'rest' session of squats, then another shorter loop. It was great to see how much fitter Amanda is getting and having a crowd of us laughing, crying and swearing in the garage and in the rain would have made for a rather unusual site to passers by I'm sure.

Monday was an off day, but the first day of the ultra-low-carb 2 weeks. Yep, protein shakes for breakfast and lunch, a yummy dinner (no stodge) and another shake before bed. Despite eating pretty much no carbs for the entire day, I didn't crave anything, but my blood sugars remained high. It is almost defiantly due to fat being converted to sugars, so time will tell... Weight has remained static since the challenge started, but this diet may well help, and probably do my blood and organs some good too.

Tuesday I woke with a headache. A detox-like hangover. Not a skull piercer, just an annoying one in my left temple. Another protein shake for breakfast and at lunchtime a session in the park again. As part of an ongoing fit-test, Tracey had us run a mile (literally, 1.6km) and then do push-ups, crunchies, squats, side-to-side jumping and chin-ups. None of it was fun, starting from 100m into the run when my headache doubled in size, and with about 400m to go, my shins started to groan. I still managed under 9 minutes which is an average of about 10.5kph, a speed I'm happy to maintain for a while. If I can hold a speed of 10kph for a distance of 20km, I'll be a very happy man! My crunchies and push-ups were on-par with the last test, but I managed 9 chin-ups when I wouldn't have been able to do 1 a matter of weeks ago! More time to work on that tho, more improvements to be made, here's hoping the diet, running, cycling and workouts combine to produce immediate results!

Steady as she goes

In the early weeks of this 20 week challenge I was being hit left, right and centre by new ideas, new food options, new schedules and new ways to do what I have already been doing. We're well past half way now, on the ragged downward slope to the finish line, and it seems that routine has started to set in. This is both a good and bad thing.

It's been over a week since I last updated, and I have done 5 more sessions in the park since then. Some have been pretty hard, involving repetition of an exercise to enable pain in targeting of a single area of your body, to running about and exercising to Hairy McLeary, to resistance exercises that have made my butt muscles ache, not to mention buckets of toys and trading exercises. So far there has not been a single session repeated, Tracey is doing damn well there, and none of the participants have been trying to find excuses to skip the sessions (so far).

I'm still enjoying these short bursts of activity, and while I don't notice it all the time, there have been a few occasions where I have seen some muscle popping out to say hi, or looking a little more defined than when I saw it last.  While I don't feel stronger yet, I know I am. I can do chin-ups now! I can do way more pushups in a minute than I have ever been able to do.

My cardio is still pretty bad and needs a lot more work. I find that I tend to slacken off once I start puffing and blowing. I need more mental training in this area, as I know my body will work harder than my mind is saying it will. For example, when riding up a hill, as I start to blow, my mind starts trying to convince me that I should slow, or stop, and soon! Sometimes I can get around this by asking questions of myself - "am I gasping for breath?" or "are my legs screaming with white-hot pain?" - if neither of these (usual causes) is a definite 'yes' then it's my brain not my body that wants to stop, and far too often it demands a reassessment and rest over and over again.

Tonight, I go for a jog. Yes, it's gonna hurt my shins, and when the pain is bad I will stop, but it's going to be a little different as I will be jogging with a companion. Tonight Logan and I go for a run to size each other up. He might be too fast, or get his second wind before I do, or want to do a lot more distance than I can, but either way, we'll both be jogging in the dark tonight. This is part of the training for the Twizel Hard Labour weekend in 5 months time. By then I'll have to be able to run 19km, in the hills, and follow it up with a 90km road ride, and follow that up with a 44km mountain bike ride. Gawd I hope I can learn to run.

So, what about the bad thing about being in a routine? Exercise wise it's fine. More fitness for not much extra time commitment, however my diet is shabby again. I blame Tracey (as you would) but my incidental junk-food consumption has built up to pre-20-weeks levels. Cupcakes, banana bread (with choc chips) and Belgium slice have all featured in my daily food diary over the past few weeks, more than once. My weight is still over 100kg and my tummy is still there, and diet is the only real fix for that. Alcohol consumption is way down, carb consumption is down below previous levels (despite the cakes) but both of these are still too high. I might have to do a very restrictive diet for a few weeks to knock a few kilos off and trim the gut, avoid all of my favourite ingestibles and see if there's improvement. If there's none, then it's back to cakes and pies as diet is obviously not the cause of my wobbly tummy :)

If you have 20 minutes, why not join me in the park one lunchtime?

More work required

Last week was a bit of a blur. The days keep coming and going so fast it's hard to keep track of them. I'm up to my eyeballs in work and the piles never seem to diminish. My knees got real sore, so I attempted to rest them as much as possible for a week, and thankfully by the weekend they had mostly recovered.

The sessions in the park last week were the usual hard stuff, with a squat & pushup day having us do 165 of each of them. Seriously tough, but we did it! Friday saw us playing cards (thankfully I only drew the joker once, poor Len got it 3 times!) and earlier in the week we were made to run for the next exercise, collecting random (or were they?) tasks from a collection about 100m away. 

One of the reasons I was resting my knees is because I had a couple of races lined up on Saturday. The Christchurch Singletrack Club Fiesta! I had entered in 2 races - the Tranquilo and the Velovidad Solo. The night before I attempted to get both my bikes into the little convertible, and failed, so borrowed a friends cars to transport us to the Living Springs track.

I had of course forgotten to take my insulin and meter with me, so was possibly running a little high in sugars on arrival, but was feeling OK. I registered, prepared and got dressed in my '404 Mexican costume not found' set of plastic overalls. Man, it seemed like such a good idea the night before. We watched the Rapido race for a wee while and then Tracey headed off to marshal at the bottom of the very long downhill. I took the track down to the start line (bottom of the hill) and remembered very little of the track from my one and only lap of it about 6 months ago.

We started up the 4x4 farm track, a steep little climb that sucks the wind and energy out of you, especially when you hate uphills anyhow. Then it's a gradual but pretty constant grind up through 'the pines' to get to the top of the course for about 1.5km. By the time I got to the top, and began my descent, over 15mins had passed, not a good sign when the lap times are under that for the speedy buggers. The downhill was fun, lots and lots of fun, but I was hot and sweating like a piggy in my plastic bag and temperatures were ranging from roasting hot to briskly cold as I navigated the descent.

As I passed Tracey at the marshal point I stopped and stripped off my top, leaving just skin and plastic overalls. Yuk, man it was horrible in there. I realised I was losing a lot of water, more than usual and was getting very thirsty but more importantly, was getting very tired. I knew in about 200m I'd be climbing the 4x4 track and 'the pines' again. I was not mentally prepared to do it again. At this stage I had been overtaken by most of the field and could see Mel about 100m behind me. I rode half of the 4x4 track, pushed the rest, and continued uphill, stopping on occasion to have a rest. I wasn't panting massively, nor were my legs screaming, I was just exhausted, and the ride up that hill the second time had me thinking that I may have to retire before the finish - a DNF I never want to see beside my name. But after what seemed like an eternity I made it to the top with mad buggers with megaphones and soft toys and encouraging words had me revived and descending the hill for the 3rd time that day. 

I passed Tracey again, mentioned my exhaustion but carried on, dreading the uphill again. It's sad that my memory of this event will be the uphill section, because I'm pretty sure I loved the downhill bits! But as I turned onto the 4x4 road again, I immediately dismounted and pushed the entire road. I remounted and started riding 'the pines' knowing it was going to be long, hard and mentally challenging. This was however the last climb, and that thought alone kept me trudging up. Corners I had managed to ride in previous laps were now pushed around, steep pinches were pushed up, and when I knew I was almost at the camp again I was ready to collapse. Still, no major cardio blowout, nor were the legs in pain, just knackered. 

As I passed by the camp with about 500m to go (only half uphill) I was encouraged along again (cheers for the push Scatter!) and made it to the finish line in position 17 of 21 starters. A pretty poor show and very disappointing. I must have thought about giving up on that race 100 times. But once I was descending instead of ascending, I was OK. My last downhill had been sketchy but apart from one overly close encounter with a tree, it wasn't any slower than my previous one.

I met Tracey at the finish line (she must have run up that hill pretty fast!) and put my top back on (urgh! wet? Dripping!!) and sunk a couple of bottles of water pretty quick, and a couple of pies too. I decided there was no way I was going to cope in the singlespeed race, which was disappointing, but I could do that another day! Spectating that race was damn good fun as many singlespeed races are. 

Sunday was spent inside. No hill walks, no weight sessions, just relaxing in front of the computer again. Sadly, was up till after midnight working, so something has to give there. I need more time to do more fun things or I'm going to burn out mentally rather than physically.

This week will be back to usual, hopefully we'll have more participants in the park at lunchtime too. My next big event is no longer Tekapo, it now the Twizel hard Labour weekend - all 3 events, on tandem, with Logan. Gulp.