three things thursday
1. The first thing Thursday has got to be my mental state. I felt completely flattened after this weekend. I spent some of Monday morning rehashing and over-analyzing, and then suddenly I just don't want to talk about it anymore. I'm ready for a break. I'm ready to do things for fun again, and not be on some ridiculous and completely inflexible schedule. I've been married to triathlon for the past few months and I feel like his shell-shocked battered wife. I just want to hide in my sweatpants and ignore my HR monitor and let people be nice to me for a little while. So that's what I'm going to do. I've made a lot of important decisions over the past few days, and one of the best of them lets me go back and train with CAR for a month or so until Ironman base training gets cranked up later this winter. I need to spend some time focusing on my running, as it is the weakest link, which helps it to all line up quite nicely.
2. That said, I do want to discuss one other piece of race preparation that I quite intentionally left out last week: nutrition. Last spring for Kinetic, I attempted (and moderately achieved) to carb-deplete when I started tapering, and then carb-loaded 3 days out - Wednesday afternoon - for the race. This time around, I decided to change a few things. I decided that when taper started, I would take out my two biggest calorie sources in my diet - beer and ice cream. I also decided to not completely carb-deplete, but instead take as much of the bread as I could handle out of my diet and focus on eating really clean (i.e. getting carbs from fruits and veggies instead of pounding the pita).
In hindsight, this was both a really fabulous and really horrendous idea. I think that making this change to my diet was a good idea, because after I adjusted to it (about 5 days), I felt strong and clean and lean. However, I think that deciding to do this while tapering was maybe the worst possible time to do it and nearly ended my marriage (see: adjustment period). Thursday night I had a piece of bread with dinner and it really took the edge off, but I didn't "carb load" for my race on Saturday. I did make sure to have two pieces of bread with dinner Friday night, but I didn't have the pasta dish that I usually fill up on. Did this make a difference on race day? I can't really say for sure, although it's hugely important to note that the collection of nutritional changes I made this cycle had the end result of me not having poopy pants during or after the race. It also caused me to lose about 4lbs in 10 days. Arguably a lot of this was water weight anyhow, and I've gained 2 back since the race, but my weight at no time was lighter than I was last spring, so I don't feel like this was a scary or dangerous weight loss.
Moving forward, I've put the bread back in my diet, but I think I'm going to try and keep things as clean as possible and see how I adapt as training ramps back up. I spent the first three days after the race living on leftover birthday cake and booze, and that's all fine, but yesterday I finally had a normal day of eating and I feel better for it. That doesn't mean that I'm never going to have beer or ice cream, but I definitely don't need to be having one or the other (or both) every day. I think that once I'm in IM training it's going to be far more difficult to change my habits, so I'm going to keep trying to make small changes now.
3. I'm making a big pile called "recipes to try" to work through this fall, but tonight I'm making one of my regular dinners and I'm just so excited. The "habit-changing" can start tomorrow. And there are 2 (sometimes 3) of us, and this is supposed to serve 4-6 (8?) at least, so drop on by...
Happy Thursday, all!
2. That said, I do want to discuss one other piece of race preparation that I quite intentionally left out last week: nutrition. Last spring for Kinetic, I attempted (and moderately achieved) to carb-deplete when I started tapering, and then carb-loaded 3 days out - Wednesday afternoon - for the race. This time around, I decided to change a few things. I decided that when taper started, I would take out my two biggest calorie sources in my diet - beer and ice cream. I also decided to not completely carb-deplete, but instead take as much of the bread as I could handle out of my diet and focus on eating really clean (i.e. getting carbs from fruits and veggies instead of pounding the pita).
In hindsight, this was both a really fabulous and really horrendous idea. I think that making this change to my diet was a good idea, because after I adjusted to it (about 5 days), I felt strong and clean and lean. However, I think that deciding to do this while tapering was maybe the worst possible time to do it and nearly ended my marriage (see: adjustment period). Thursday night I had a piece of bread with dinner and it really took the edge off, but I didn't "carb load" for my race on Saturday. I did make sure to have two pieces of bread with dinner Friday night, but I didn't have the pasta dish that I usually fill up on. Did this make a difference on race day? I can't really say for sure, although it's hugely important to note that the collection of nutritional changes I made this cycle had the end result of me not having poopy pants during or after the race. It also caused me to lose about 4lbs in 10 days. Arguably a lot of this was water weight anyhow, and I've gained 2 back since the race, but my weight at no time was lighter than I was last spring, so I don't feel like this was a scary or dangerous weight loss.
Moving forward, I've put the bread back in my diet, but I think I'm going to try and keep things as clean as possible and see how I adapt as training ramps back up. I spent the first three days after the race living on leftover birthday cake and booze, and that's all fine, but yesterday I finally had a normal day of eating and I feel better for it. That doesn't mean that I'm never going to have beer or ice cream, but I definitely don't need to be having one or the other (or both) every day. I think that once I'm in IM training it's going to be far more difficult to change my habits, so I'm going to keep trying to make small changes now.
3. I'm making a big pile called "recipes to try" to work through this fall, but tonight I'm making one of my regular dinners and I'm just so excited. The "habit-changing" can start tomorrow. And there are 2 (sometimes 3) of us, and this is supposed to serve 4-6 (8?) at least, so drop on by...
Happy Thursday, all!