Sunday, January 29, 2017

If At First You Don't Succeed

Repeat the week until you do.

I've been in a really bad funk for over a week.  All I've wanted to do is snuggle with the bunnies, sleep, practice yoga, and eat junk food - in that order.  Bike?  Yeah, one workout out of 3 happened.  Running?  Did that once.  Swimming? Said 'screw that' and took to my yoga mat instead.  I'll be repeating Week 3 of Sweet Spot Base training this coming week.

Bunnies make everything better

The only good-for-me thing (besides chilling with Walter and Spot) I did with any consistency this week was practice yoga, which was probably because it's one of the first things I do in the morning.  The Cave is far too cold in the morning, so I've been unrolling my mat in the very warm guest bedroom, perching my laptop on the bed, and doing my best not to smack the ceiling fan whenever I reach my arms up in mountain pose.


On the food front, I've eaten a lot of things that aren't good for me this week, but they sure as hell tasted good.  I've never met a tortilla chip that I don't like!


I feel like crap, but I know that eating crap and doing nothing isn't going to help.  Time to get out of the funk and back on the program. Time to start showing up again.



Sunday, January 22, 2017

Untitled

It seems a bit ridiculous to write about myself, whatever workouts I did/didn't do, and what I ate after the events of this week, so I'm just going to leave this here:




I'll be back next week.  Until then, Namaste.

Sunday, January 15, 2017

5AM...the Miracle Hour?

The first week of Sweet Spot training was tough, but I kind of enjoyed it.  I feel like I'm finally starting to get back in the groove of working out consistently - and the whole 5AM Miracle thing is starting to get easier too.

Monday started with a 5AM wake up followed by a short yoga practice, and a full day at work.  After work, I scurried home, changed clothes, and hauled ass to the gym to get a run in before my training appointment.  I didn't have as much time to run as I wanted, but I made the most of the 20 minutes I had by running hard.  10 minutes into my training session, I was on the verge of fainting.  After a couple of questions from my trainer, it hit me...it was 6:40pm and I hadn't eaten a thing since noon...so my body was running on fumes.  After we finished our session and I hightailed it home for dinner. Note To Self: There's no such thing as being to busy to scarf a banana before a workout!

I'm never too busy for a banana!
After the near-fainting episode, the rest of the week went well. All workouts were done, yoga was practiced, and getting up on time happened every day but Thursday.  We swim late (starting around 8:45pm) on Wednesday nights, so I didn't get to bed at a reasonable hour and my brain decided that this was a good excuse to thwack the snooze button...until 6:30AM.  I skipped my yoga practice that morning, but still made it out the door on time. We'll leave a discussion of my really poor food choices on Thursday for another day.

I don't think I'll ever love getting up before the crack of dawn, but I am starting to see the benefits of going to bed at the same time every night and getting up really early.  Since I've started trying to follow the 5AM Miracle, I've had time for yoga, books, and breakfast before leaving the house every day.  On the day that I overslept, I felt completely out of sorts.  Eventually, I'd like to find a way to fit in my bike workouts before work too.  Am I on the verge of becoming a morning person?


I think I'm still in the Ostrich Stage


I may have made some poor food choices on Thursday, but can we talk about some of my good choices for a minute?  I was starving when I got off the bike on Friday night and talked myself out of going out for dinner. Instead, I put together this lovely concoction in under 30 minutes.



In the bowl:

  • brown rice
  • cuban style black beans (from Trader Joe's)
  • shrimp cooked in hatch chili salsa
  • a little shredded cheese
  • salsa
  • sour cream
  • guacamole (not pictured because I forgot to throw it in there before taking a picture)
I'm pretty sure that these messy 'meals in a bowl' will become more and more common in the Rabbits and Runs household as tri training really gets under way.

I'm also getting reacquainted with my crockpot since it's a hands off way to make a bunch of food. Both Mr. R&R and I have been craving red meat for the last few days so I pulled out the crockpot to make Beef with Mushrooms and Red Wine Sauce.   I threw everything into the crockpot around 9AM (I used 2 packages of baby portobella mushrooms because I really like 'em), set it and walked away until dinner time.



I closed out Week 1 of Sweet Spot Training with:

Swim:    1200 yards (0.68 miles)
Bike:      40.3 miles
Run:       6.55 miles
Yoga:      5 practices (ranging from 10-50 minutes)
Strength: 1 session

Total Time:       7 hours, 11 minutes
Total Distance: 47.53 miles
Cumulative Distance: 68.86 miles (that's roughly the distance between my house and Madison, WI!)

What's your morning like?  Are you an early riser or do you prefer to snooze until the last possible second?

Sunday, January 8, 2017

So Long Pre-Hab. Hello Sweet Spot Training.

6 weeks of pre-hab has reminded me of a very important lesson: fitness gains are hard won and easily lost.  It's time to put in the work to regain some of that bike fitness I had at the end of last summer.  Enter: Sweet Spot Training.


Not THAT kind of sweet
The goal of sweet spot training is to increase pedal economy and build a base of aerobic fitness on the bike - both of which get sorely neglected as the season progresses.  In this phase I'll be aiming for  three rides a week (2 60-minute sessions, 1 90-minute session), running twice a week (1 shorter session before my training appointment, 1 longer session on the weekend), swimming once a week, and strength training once a week with my trainer.

The final week of pre-hab wasn't too bad.  I actually got up at 5AM every day (Monday-Thursday - I overslept by 30 minutes on Friday) and did a 20 minute yoga practice before work 3 times, and spent some quality floor time stretching on another day.  It was nice not having to fly through the morning as a giant stress ball, but I was definitely wasted by the end of the day - which made finding the motivation to work out rather difficult. My week ended up looking something like this:

Monday: 20 minute yoga practice
Tuesday: 20 minute yoga practice, 15min treadmill run, 30 minute training session
Wednesday: 20 minute yoga practice, 30 minute trainer ride (I just felt like spinning without a plan)
Thursday: 20 minutes stretching on the floor, 60 minute trainer ride
Friday: 20 minutes strength training at home
Saturday: Zero
Sunday: 1000 yd swim

Total Time: 4 hours, 7 minutes
Total Distance: 21.33 miles*

Definitely not the strongest finish, but I think next week will be better.  I has to be.  'A Race Day' is less than 7 months away!

*I looked at 2016's Garmin data and between swimming/biking/running/hiking, I put 895.94 miles on my body.  Let's see if I can blow that out of the water in 2017! I'm also working on trying to find a more visual way to display this, but in the interest of posting this in a timely manner, it'll have to wait!

Sunday, January 1, 2017

Hello 2017 (and 1 More Week of Pre-Hab)


Welcome to 2017 - and the last week of Pre-Hab.  I had all kinds of good intentions of posting weekly updates during this phase, but obviously I fell short of that goal.  

However, it's a new year, which means a chance to try (and tri!) again.

I'm not really a fan of New Year's resolutions because they're often unspecific, unmeasurable, and easy to push aside at the first sign of having to do actual work to achieve them.  After reading a really fantastic book last year (The 5AM Miracle by Jeff Sanders), I've moved to more of a quarterly goals system of specific, measurable goals - and concrete steps toward achieving them. 

One of my big goals for the last quarter of 2016 was to get back in the pool/on the bike/in my running shoes.  The first 5 weeks of Pre-Hab certainly weren't perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but it's definitely an improvement on where I was.  I feel stronger and my mood has definitely improved, so right there it's a win.

The Pre-Hab goal is obviously a sub-goal of one of my major (read long term) goals: To Kill My A Race, so obviously that sub-goal is spilling over into the first (and second, and third) quarter of 2017.  Hopefully I'll do a better job of documenting my progress toward that giant goal here.  

On that note, I'm off to bed soon because I'm going to attempt an early morning workout tomorrow since I have the day off of work and then I'm hoping to get in the kitchen and do some serious meal prep.

What about you?  Do you like big New Year's resolutions or do you prefer a more short term system?