Week 10 – Vodka for Dinner and Other Sacrifices

Food:

This week I have learned that sacrifices must be made to make progress, and that I can’t have my cake and eat it too.

I partied pretty hard twice this week.  Both times, to justify the calories, for the most part, skipped dinner (I had small snacks both days, but not a meal).  While I don’t typically drink to that level very often, I did remember days of having to shelve half my dinner or more if I wanted to indulge when I was losing weight.

The good news is that remembering this made me stop bitching to twitter about poor little Quix who had to much to drink and is getting her dinner taken away and just enduring it.  I’m a big girl and I make those choices.

The bad news is that I will need to remember that when I do alcohol instead of the food I need to eat, rather than alcohol + the food I need to eat makes training days suck.  My gas tank felt like I was running on empty most of Saturday because my gas tank was full of crap, and I didn’t do much better by myself the rest of the weekend.  Today I feel sluggish, tired, I’ve been peeing all day getting rid of water, and really looking forward to NOT indulging in junk food for quite a while.

But, I remember there were sacrifices on the way down from 20000 billion lbs.  As much as I remember it with rosy colored glasses that it was just effortless once I got going, I went to bed hungry sometimes.  I had vodka for dinner because I chose those calories over good calories.  I went into workouts underfueled.  And y’know what?  This far away from season?  That’s ok.  I honestly believe 10 lbs down would help me much more than feeling awesome for each training session.  90% of my meals are awesome, healthy food.  I just need to remember that the 10% crap needs to be INSTEAD of the 10% healthy, or I’ll continue to end up with 110% me each year like I have been.

However, there are exceptions.  This weekend, I’m riding a metric century.  I expect that I’ll be burning about 2000 calories doing that alone, so probably eating 2500-3000 calories that day is not too out of the question (and luckily, I have a wedding to go to that evening, so I should have no problems with that).  There is underfueling and there’s stupid.  I aim to find that line and not cross it.

That being said, here’s the numbers:

Monday: 22 DQ, 1608 calories
Tuesday: 26 DQ, 1747 calories
Wednesday: 27 DQ, 1530 calories
Thursday: 2 DQ, 1977 calories (vodka for dinner)
Friday: 13 DQ, 2097 (ren faire catered meal + drink + desert)
Saturday: 3 DQ, 2696 calories (birthday fest)
Sunday: 13 DQ, 1403 calories

Average Calories In: 1865, estimated calories out 2285 (estimated deficit 420 per day or 2945 total, or about 3/4 lb)

Average Diet Quality Score: 15 (low low low)

Weight: low 183.2, high 188.8.

No wonder I’m getting frustrated, there’s no way to tell if I’m losing 3/4 lb when I fluctuate almost 6 lbs per week :P.

Oh well, onwards and upwards.  Hopefully, there will not be vodka for dinner this week.  My body would be thankful for that.

Training:

I shorted myself a little less than an hour, which sucks, but oh well.  It really wasn’t intentional.

Swim:  I cannot say enough good things about swimming.  My slow pace is pretty not slow, I’m enjoying the speedwork, and I have a wetsuit to play in when the lake is cold.  When my form is good, I feel like a spider crawling on top of the water, being pushed by the current.  Isn’t that weird?  I was bummed that I couldn’t get our first open water swim in this weekend (planned for 30 mins but only made it 10 mins breaststroking out and back to the first buoy) – but it was nice to know that when the lake isn’t like a wave pool, the wetsuit will work just fine even in 64 degree water.

Bike: Eh.  The wind made riding really unsafe, so we cut what should have an hour ride to 37 mins, and that was less than 9 miles due to WIIIIIIIIND.  My wheel kept singing me the song of it’s people, which was an eerie whistling sound I’ve never heard before so loud and so often that it was really just unsafe to ride.  The bike is my meh sport right now, but hopefully that will change once I get out and ride hills more and get my quad mojo back.

Run: This sport is definitely coming around for me though sometimes I just want to say SHUT UP HEART.  The great thing about recognizing zone 1/2 running is that I can knock a 10 mile run (when I haven’t even run CLOSE to double digits since the marathon) and my legs are like… did we just take a long walk?  Also, I did 2 amazing tempo miles in the middle – miles 7 and 8 – and the pace wasn’t that great (read: the wind), but I felt like I wanted to run that effort forever.  So if I’m doing that around 10:45s in the wind, at the end of a long run, and on a day where I kinda felt like crap, I certainly can get uncomfortable and sub 10 on race day, right?  Also, I did hill repeats and made the lunch run crew do them with me Tuesday – that will probably be a regular thing – they loved to hate it with me.

Weights: Increased weights on some stuff.  I can definitely tell I’m either where I’m supposed to be or at the top of my capacity right now.  I’ve had fun with heavy weights, but I’m ready to move onto strength maintenance, and starting the harder “force” workouts actually on the swim/bike/run to build more specific strength for sport.

Honestly, I’m a little terrified where I am at physically in relation to tri season on the bike, run, and body composition, but I’m also feeling super strong, and very confident in my swim and most importantly, my head game and strategy.  And, I have a month and a half until the first race I sorta really care about (Rookie Tri) so anything can happen.  Hell, a month and a half ago, I would have told you I was an awesome cyclist, mediocre swimmer, I had torn up my running card, and weights were the best thing ever so… yeah.  Things – they change.

By the days…

Monday: Weights: MS Phase – Day 5 45 mins, Easy Swim + Drills 1200 m/30 mins
Tuesday: Bike: Trainer + Futurama The Wild G… 26.02 mi/1h15m, Run: Lunch Run Hill Repeats 4.35 mi/50 mins
Wednesday: Run: Treadmill Run 1.76 mi/20mins, Weights:MS Day 6 + Stretching 45 mins, Swim: Speedwork Day 1800m/ 40 mins
Thursday: off
Friday:  Futurama + Trainer 13.05 mi/37 min
Saturday: Run: Lake Pfluger 3+ Laps 10.1 mi /2 hours, Bike: Lake Pfluger Out and Back 8.7 mi /37 min, Swim: Lake Pfluger Wetsuit Test 175 m/10 min
Sunday:  off

Total: 8h30 mins (supposed to be 9h30).  It was really due to missing out on about 25 mins of bike and 20 mins of swim on Saturday, but oh well.  Can’t control mother nature, and really really wanted a rest day Sunday.

This week is super build week (10.5 hours) for the Build 2 cycle so I just want to get through it alive.  4 hours of that, at least, is the Rosedale Ride.  I’m super pumped to ride another metric century and looking forward to getting lots of supported outdoor ride time.  Goal is sub 4 hours of time on bike (not counting rest stops).  Hopefully the weather cooperates.

Other stuff:

We had Brazillian Steakhouse for lunch on Thursday (Zliten’s birthday) and took a half day off work and enjoyed some time in the beautiful sunny day on our patio drinking frozen drinks.  I actually ate responsibly at an all you can eat salad bar/meat place, are y’all proud of me?  Then, I had vodka for dinner as I said, so don’t be too proud.

And for the last birthday celebration of the year, we headed to our favorite bar with about 20 of our friends and enjoyed an afternoon/evening of sipping cocktails and soaking in the sun.  And, apparently, we had a long rap concert going on inside, which made for some awesome people watching.  While again, I had vodka for dinner and looked longingly at all the greasy bar food that got ordered (I did snack on some fries though), I had a blast that day!

However, I’m definitely ready for things to go back to normal.  I’d like some solid time of good food, hydration, and normal human levels of alcohol consumption going on so I don’t feel like a lump of excrement.

Question: what was the biggest sacrifice you had to make to reach a goal?