March Recap, April Goals

March was a whirlwind!  Birthdays, fun days, outings, scuba, build month #2 – I’m tired just thinking about it.  How did my goals fare?  Read on, friends, read on…

1.  Stick with my current strategy: approximately 1700 calories (shift up on days that my workout volume reaches the sky).  DQ score: over 20 every day average.  See if this results in any sort of loss.  Low weight of the month: 184.  Let’s get lower.  Accept (and relish) that there will be 3 birthday splurges this month, and just try to mitigate them with good food the rest of the day/week.

Check.  I lost weight!  Just a little but… low of 182.2.  Yay!

2.  Get the leezard to the vet for a checkup.  She’s overdue.  We’re bad leezard parents.

Check.  Got her in today.

3. Bike outside once a week.  Even if you have to do some rides outside after work in the ‘hood with stoplights.  Ride Rosedale on March 23.  Do it in way less than the 5+ hours it took last year.

Check – except for this week.  Rosedale Ride – 4:29, over 45 min PR!  Wheee!

4.  Fix up a March training plan.  Nail it.  Start working in zone 3 more, doing cruise intervals.  Start doing some short all out force efforts.  Get to recovery week uninjured and happy.

Check.  Yes indeed.  Lovin’ the tempos and hills.  Body feels pretty great!

5.  Make pillows for the couch.  This involves: going to the store, picking out fabric, sewing, and stuffing them.  Complete at least one.  Complete four for the gold star.

Check!  Gold Star Accomplished – totally made four awesome pillows!

6. Finish organizing the DVDs and complete the next zone in the house, the rest of the bedroom/master bath/vanity area.  We’ve already half completed it with the new bedroom furniture, but this involves cleaning out and organizing the vanity area, linen closet area, and stuff in the master bath.  Extra credit: replacing the bunk fixures and faucet.

Big Fail.  DVDs done, but haven’t touched the bedroom.  Wah-wah.

7. Finish the sewing book, start a fiction book, for reals.

Fail.  Another dive book inserted.  Also, I realized that I need to have a project to get through to really understand it.  I think I’ll just move onto fiction next month.

8. This one is for the habits again.  No cigs (will have to dispose the Commercial Humidor), no sweets (minus planned splurges, no more than once a week), HR train, batch cook, have a game night.

Check!  Habits are becoming habits, fancy that.

9.  Find my zen in this month in small chunks.  I do not have a weekend that I know of from now until vacation that’s not booked up with at least one event, most have several.  Find some time to relax and veg out.  Carve out a weekday night where all we do after work is go home and relax and say fuck responsibility instead of doing stuff.  At least do what I did on Wednesday and say “though I have things to do, I am sitting on the couch and watching TV for an hour”.

Did my best.  Had some nice mellow mornings, and took some time to relax even when I had other things to do.

10. Take care of my appearance a bit.  Self manicure, pedicure, and eyebrow unfluff.  Get a haircut (or schedule a time before the cruise).  I want about 4-6 inches cut off soon – short hair deals with being soggy from training much better than long hair.  Penalty for not completing: I am required to book this  (mani/pedi/brows) at a salon which actually terrifies me.

Half check – manicure/pedicure done.  Brows not done.  Hair – I tried, but they wouldn’t book an appointment on a weekend and then since I didn’t have an appointment, I decided to eat lunch and drink beer instead.  New mandate – hair and brows must be done by cruise or I have to book some REALLY expensive spa appointments.

11.  Play some damn vidjya games.  I have Monkey Island on the PS3, I keep meaning to log in and play Everquest, I need Zliten to educate me in the ways of Bloodbowl (orcs + football) so I can decide whether I want to join the league at work, I have a tablet builder game I’ve been working through…

Errr… I played bloodbowl once.  So technically yes, but I could have done better.  Bronze star.

12.  Figure out this mojo thing.  I am operating my the numbers and schedules and performing, but my spirit is lacking.  My heart just isn’t in it lately.  Analyze the issue and take steps to fix it.

Felt better this month.  A little weight progress, permission to tempo and do some harder stuff, and starting to get excited for race season.  I’m not sure the legs and lungs are there yet, but the fire in the belly is there and the mental game feels more on.

13.  Drink more water.  I’d like to get down 3 bottles before I leave work each day, and one more at home.

Meh.  It’s not warm enough to really want to drink enough water and I’m just OVER water.  I’m generally drinking the generally accepted 64 oz, but as I like to do sporty endeavours, I should drink more.  Some days I do, some I don’t.

6 checks, 4 sortas, and 3 fails ain’t too bad.  Let’s move on…

April is the month of being on vacation a lot.  So, these goals will mostly be centered around not fucking up while not on normal routine:

1.  While not on vacation, eat like an ANGEL.  Keep with the  Quixitarian diet (mostly vegan, with greek yogurt, fish, and muscle milk, with some meat whenever I’m supercraving it).  At the end of the month, I want to weight less than 182.2.  I would love to break 180 before I go on vacation.  Continue tracking daily weight and stats in Training Peaks, oddly enough, I have had WAY less freakouts about weight when it’s a number I measure and record daily.  Continue to pre-track weekly, that shit helps!

2.  While on vacation, I will be trying to enjoy in moderation.  Lots of strategies in my head, some include taking a travel scale (that’s a good check if I’m really being obnoxious with my consumption), having a one-desert-per-day maximum, trying to make a one-plate-per-meal maximum, tracking diet quality, and/or trying to figure out some way to not gain 10 lbs right before my next two months of big races (like I did last vacay).  Let me assure you – I would not take these steps if it was an offseason trip, but I was very much in shape a month before last year’s A race, and I ruined it with a 10 day vacation of pigging out.  I don’t want to do that again.  This vacation is about spending time with family and scuba and hitting every beach for as many hours as I can.  I’m going to try to make it not about stuffing my face.

3.  April’s plan is made – I need to focus on getting in the hours.  A few workouts got cut short or skipped in March due to various reasons, and while it’s not to the level that I think my overall race prep suffered, we are doing the last build month.  On vacation, I’ll be flexible with the composition and type of workouts, but I want to match the hours.  Also, run in a different country!

4. For sewing, I just want to mend everything that has holes in it on the pile of things that I want to bring on vacation.  Amazingly enough, staying about the same size for 2-3 years means clothing gets holes in it before I can ship it back to the thrift store.

5. Read some books on vacation.  Not textbooks.  Not triathlon books.  Relax-y sci fi space fun books.

6. Catching up: cut my hair, do my brows, and refresh mani/pedi before vacation.  Put the “organize the house” initiative on pause, but any steps that can be taken to finish the bedroom would rock.  I’m going to drop the no cigs, HR train, batch cook, have a game night, etc, because they are just happening now.

7. Relax on vacation.  Don’t come home feeling like it was 10 days of crazy gogogogo and now you’re back to life which is the same.  Conversely, try to relax enough before vacation that you don’t feel like you just want to shut down and not do the cool things you have planned.

8. Bathe the ‘guana every day possible (at least every other) and get her a humidifier.  She’s doing great, but she is a little dehydrated because she’s not very smart and forgets she has water.

9. Use these two races this month – the 10 mile running race and the second century as good (head and body) training.  For the 10/20, I want to dig deep.  I want to find that place where it hurts, but my heart rate says I’m handling it physically, and just claw my way through the end and not relent.  Also, I’d really like to sub-10 min/mile it.  Because I have a really stupid dumb secret goal this year that is probably unobtainable, but still fun to entertain, and this would be good progress to check how that’s going.  Also, there is no reason that I should finish century ride #2 slower than #1 unless the weather sucks, but either way, its 60+ miles of outdoor riding, and motivation not to make an ass of myself on vacation (since it’s the day after I get back).

10. Buy some fun t-shirts from the ports.  Since I love wearing my Alaska cycle shirt, I need at least one with a diver.  Bring back some souvenirs for my leads and something that makes noise for my sound guys.

11.  Keep a journal of vacation – even though it can be a pain to write every day, I love rereading these and it helps me remember all the fun timez had.

12.  Not buy a whole mess of random things for vacation because we might need it (I guarantee I have everything I need right now to go, and whatever I don’t have I probably don’t need).  Exception is I’m out of travel deodorant (which will immediately go into my gym bag after) and I want a damn necklace charm to go with these gorgeous earrings I got that don’t match a fucking thing I own.

13.  Not spend a billion dollars on vacation.  I’m sure there will be a day or two we have some drinks, but try to limit it to just a few because we can get drunk at home (way cheaper), and getting drunk with access to free food equals getting faaaaaaat quick.  Don’t buy 20 billion pictures because the ones from the last two cruises have never been scanned and are just sitting somewhere in the office.  Spend on experiences (scuba, transport around areas, entry fees, etc) and not on stupid stuff that doesn’t matter.

And on that note, I’m going to try to not already be on vacation…. normal weekly wrapup coming up soon!