I have not posted lately but am still going at it. I am in the mode to try and increase the amount of training and have found a few problems with my plan. Today I also hit my milestone of needing to burn/save 100,000 more calories to hit my estimate of what I need to do to burn off my excess weight. The starting number was 240,000. Iam currently hitting my low weight again, but I have been seeing other goals reached even when the pounds didn’t drop. I must have been in a lose the inches mode by switching out fat for muscle and as a few of my scarce posts indicate I was having trouble on the food side of the equation.
I am doing a triathlon every Saturday with unrealistic transition times because I go change in the locker room. So there is about 10-15 minutes between each workout.
I start out with a half iron man swim, 2100 yards. I time myself for 1650 of it which is an olympic swim, and use 250 to warm up and 200 to cool down. So in this sense its also unrealistic as far as race conditions go. My best 1650 time so far is 30:50, I am trying to get it under 30 minutes and am so close I should bust it any week now.
The bike is a spinning class with a gung ho instructor. I go about 15 miles according to the bike, but I am not sure I believe that thing. This is a hard workout that has me making a big sweaty mess on the bike and floor. I am sure the person in the yoga class that follows that gets my little area on the floor is not too happy about it. Weather has stopped me from getting out on the road, and laziness I suppose. I should be able to get a much better sense of how the spinning class intensity equates to real miles on my bike.
A few of us in the class then go for a run of 3-4 miles. I am sure that as we go further along in the year we will be increasing the distance. We seem to run at a group pace of 9:00 to 9:30 per mile depending on the group which is perfect for me at this point in time. Although I hope to drop to 8 minute miles, I still have my best 4 mile time at a 8:50 pace and don’t see any huge strides coming in that area, only measured increases over time.
Now I know it is important to get in a post exercise recovery meal. I typically have a water bottle in my locker and eat a mini cliff bar or two as I am still cooling down (100 calories per bar). This seems to work fine for my other classes like when I just swim, or just run. But for this longer workout which is about 2 hours 10 minute of workout over a 2 and a half hour period just doesn’t cut it. I get extreemly tired and wind up taking a nap in the afternoon. Now I am not one to be scared of a nap, but taking one because I feel completely wiped out after a good nights rest and a good long intense workout seems to be signalling some problem. My working hyposthesis is the post exercize recovery meal is not adequate.
I have been looking into finding a good recovery drink that doesn’t have me spending $50 for a bottle of powder or $2 per single serving packets. The stuff out there just seems so expensive. The simple fact of the matter is there just has to be easy ingredients to “build your own” recovery drink for less than a quarter per serving. The one thing I seem to have found is that part of my problem might be not getting enough calories for a good recovery. Now I do the 100 calories and then go eat a meal, but I am in weight loss mode which is at odds with optimum performace mode. I think I need to use a recovery drink that has the protien and carbs and gives me at least 300-400 calories. That seems to be the right target. I will be doing some more research on the topic and will try and figure out how to make my own drink, that is as good as the “engineered” ones from separate ingredients to cost much less. We’ll see how that goes. I hope to post my research results sometime next week.
