End of March. Training good, Eating Bad

Well for the sake of keeping a journal regarding my recovery from last Sunday’s 15K race. I’d say that by Thursday I no longer was feeling any muscle “pain”.
Yoga was cancelled Wednesday night and we didn’t take it upon ourselves to get it done.
The result was a very tight lower back and hamstrings on Thursday.
Thursday morning was a 60 min bike trainer workout. It was hard for me to maintain the HR zone I typically workout in. So I ended up doing 1 minute intervals. That did the trick. Not sure how effective it was but it seemed less wimpy. I did a bunch of stretching after the bike.
My lower back was still bad. I figured I’d better do something about it, so I cheated. I called the chiropractor. I didn’t see my regular Dr. he was out of town. I hadn’t been to this Dr before but I’m to the point where I can tell whether the adjustments are successful or not, so I wasn’t concerned. The person filling in for him was very precise and thorough. The funny part was at the end of the appointment she says, “you should really consider getting a massage”. This is funny because people keep telling me this. I guess I just have to get over the idea (and the cost) and get it done.
Then we went to the pool that evening. The Steves were there but I didn’t join in because I was still trying to assess how my lower back was doing. As a result I put in a pretty weak effort at the pool. Genine on the other hand followed a plan and left feeling pretty good about the swim. I left thinking I’ve just gotta suck it up and follow a workout no matter what I’m feeling like. (I’ve said this many times before).

Friday: I went to work at our NJ Foley Stage. This means that I drive Genine to work then continue on to the studio another 30-40 minutes away. (Should be about 20 but with traffic…) So this eliminates the morning workout because we are on the road at 6AM. Unfortunately this also eliminated a good breakfast because I was so slow to get out of bed. My eating continued to be awful all day. When we got home after work we went for a run. I think I ran 1.5 miles and quit. I wasn’t planning on going far anyhow but that was pretty uninspiring.

Saturday: Alarm goes off at 4:45 AM. I go downstairs and start cooking up my oatmeal. It’s raining out. I text Todd to find out if we are going to run 10-15 miles in the rain. The response was “Going back to bed”. I was fine with that. I like sleep. I think I slept ‘til 9:15. Fortunately the rain let up and Maija had a long bike short run, brick workout planned. So Genine and I joined in on that. Just short of 40 miles of biking and about a 3 mile run. I didn’t have my polar watch on for the run. I’m now wondering what I ran the first 1.5 miles on. I think I still have a tendency to go out fast early but eventually I have to pull back a bit. (I’m guessing I was near the top of zone 4). I think it was an okay run but I need to keep doing these bricks and play around with my effort a bit. I could pull this off on a 5K, but 10K? I might perform better with a different approach. Obviously for the Half Iron, I had better be able to dial it back much further.

Sunday: Wake up at 4:45 again. Rain again. Harder than yesterday. Text Todd. “Go back to bed”. It would seem that we are willing to run in 11 degree weather but not rain and mid 40s. I’m guessing it’s actually a pretty good plan.
Wake up again around 8:30?? I’m definitely caught up on sleep. That’s a good thing. We figure we will get to the pool and the run later in the afternoon.
Well that didn’t exactly happen. There was plenty to do around the house. Then I decided I’d better run before the swim because it looked like it was going to rain in the evening. So at about 3 I’m out the door running, my legs were feeling tight. So I stopped at my ¾ mile mark and worked on stretching out. Another ¼ mile ahead is a long gradual down hill, that should get me moving. Everything was going alright up until about mile 4.5. Then I just lost all motivation to push through the run. So I walked the rest of the way home. Legs are feeling tight again, calves being the most problematic.
We throw our swim stuff in the car. If we are lucky we can get in about 45 minutes off swim in before it closes. We get to the pool and it’s busy. We really don’t see who we are going to be able to jump in with to share a lane. So we decide it’s just not going to happen and we leave.
We are both kind of bummin’ that our swim plan seems to be the first thing to be thrown off the list lately. So we talk about making Tuesday/Thursday nights our new Weekday swim nights in addition to Monday’s Class. Then if we happen to get a swim in on the weekend that’s just a bonus. We will see if this really happens, we both hate being at the pool to START our swim at 8:15PM. Makes the 4:30-5AM wake-ups really difficult.

Finally, March was really bad for me in terms of my eating plan and weight. I kind of got burned out Jan-Feb when I was trying to follow the plan to drop and all I did was maintain. So I decided to give it a break. I put on a good 5 pounds in March by not doing my food tracking. Two weeks before that 15K I put in a very heavy week of training and I was eating a bunch. Well the following 2 weeks were not nearly as heavy and I continued to eat like crazy. Nothing terribly unhealthy, I was just eating more.
So here I am 8 weeks before Columbia Triathlon and I’m not tracking my nutrition. That has to change NOW! Some weight will fall off just due to the fact that I’ll be eating the right number of calories. I’d be surprised that I get to 165 as I had hoped back in January. I’m going to use that as the goal number anyhow. Here we go… Again.

Oh I also have a few other run races I'm contemplating in April. More on that later.