Off with her head.

Some weeks, you just feel… off.   Mentally and physically.

Then again, any week you can feel “off” and still ride 100 miles on Saturday is a win in my book.

Starting last Monday afternoon, I felt… weak.  Tired.  Not sick, not exhausted, not hurt, just not myself and extremely unmotivated.  Definitely the kind of feeling I could push through, but probably not a great idea on race week.  I wanted to make sure I save some give-a-shit for the weekend, because riding 100 miles on an empty motivation tank would have been rough.

I started out the week strong with a swim on Monday morning, and did end up prioritizing my 2 sessions of weights, but all I did besides that was a 20 minute easy spin on the trainer.

Oh, and rode for 100 miles/7 hours over the weekend.  But still, much less than I had planned – 9 hours total instead of the probably-too-much that was scheduled.  Obviously, things worked out the way they were supposed to since I had a pretty great ride.

Onto the next, right?  This week I’m splitting the difference between “I just finished my long race” and “it was just a relaxed pace 100 mile ride”.  I don’t have huge plans to kill it all week, but I’m also not sitting on my ass drinking margaritas.

Here’s what I’ve planned this week but at any point I could just… not…

• Monday: played DDR for about 30 minutes.  Legs definitely weren’t quite as springy as normal!
• Tuesday: ~2 mile lake interval run.  Walked to the lake by work and ran around it 6 times, alternating fast and recovery/steady.  Legs still didn’t feel great but maintained low 9s for fast and high 10s/low 11s for recovery.
• Today: swim and weights
• Thursday OR Friday: brick session in the pain cave
• Saturday: riding to the BSS social ride and then home (about 40 miles)
• Sunday: off
• Monday: (bonus long weekend) bike and swim adventure (about 40 miles)

The next two weeks I’ll be focusing a little more on FAST (with some long-ish ride miles to stay in shape for Livestrong 100), and then a mini-taper to see what I can do at Kerrville Sprint in about 3.5 weeks.

I have not been able to get enough pizza lately, but with #projectraceweight in full effect, I’m making them on whole wheat/corn tortillas instead.

When you get that icky fatigued feeling, the last thing you want to do is go hungry and maintain huge deficits.  So, that’s what I did NOT do this week.  My numbers are a step back for sure but I will stand by the food I put in my mouth because I shook off the… off… without getting sick or injured and succeeded where it counted.

My body just felt INFLAMED last week and recovered just in time to get another dose of it in the shape of a hot, 7 hour bike ride where I was constantly dehydrating and rehydrating myself.  So, my weight averages are probably going to suck for a little while.  Sigh.  One step forward, two steps back.  We’ll get there someday.

• Weight: 187.9 (+2.6) lbs (to note, this would be 1.3 lbs down taking out the two days that weirdly swung up 4-5 lbs for no reason).
• Avg cal per day: 2582(+615) calories
• Avg deficit per day: 567 (-254) calories/Garmin average deficit: 167 (-371)
• Macros: 81 (+14)g fat, 244 (+54)g carbs, 109 (+3)g protein, 28(+3)g fiber

At least all the numbers make sense.  I let my fat and my total go up, my deficit go down, and my weight went up.  Everyone has crappy weeks and this was one of them.  How about the quality numbers?

DQ score: Monday: 22.  Tuesday: 16.  Wednesday: 29. Thursday: 14.  Friday: 19. Saturday: 12.  Sunday: 3.  Average comes out to approximately 16 (out of 32).

Obviously the average went way down for the week… but it’s better than when I first started tracking it.  I’m doing much better with eating the right stuff but only moderately better at avoiding the wrong stuff… let’s just say there was a little too much booze and a few more refined grains/sweets/fried food than normal.  So far, so good with eating the right stuff this week, I’m hoping to keep that trend up so the important thing (weight) will start trending down again.

I cannot wait to go see all the fishies and take pictures of all of them and eat yummy food and dive until I’m so exhausted I can’t even with myself anymore!

Getting ready to ride 100 miles and camp kind of took over our lives last week but I was able to get some things accomplished.

I made a valliant effort, if I do say so myself, at finishing my fourth chapter in my book in a short amount of time.  I’m pretty close.  Since I had a goal of four chapters in August, and I still have a little August left, my plan is to finish the last bit of this chapter today and spend some time Sunday working on the next.

I’m over 20k words and counting!  It’s not quite as prolific as when I did NaNoWriMo way back in 2009 (I think I got to something like 30-40k in a month before I quit), but that also kind of burned me out of writing.  This pace is brisk but I’m still feeling stoked to make progress.  So it’s perfect!

I downloaded the preview of the Brene Brown book, but I haven’t had any non-falling-asleep reading time.  This week, for sure.

While it’s not quite a To Do (since it’s a ta-DONE), I’m excited to say that we’ve booked our winter vacation and we’re heading back to Bonaire.  Checking out the prices for everything, and all things being fairly equal, I’d rather spend a week rolling out of bed and diving in the most beautiful place ever from the shore in my backyard than an all you can eat/drink luxury resort or a cruise or something.

So, here’s the non-training highlights for the week and long weekend – it’s a lot but also mostly fun stuff!

• Today we’re showing a friend around our gym and taking a new class!  She may get a membership! It would be fun to have more gym friends.  Then… attempting to finish up chapter 4.
• Thursday, we will likely be spending lunch picking out our kitchen cabinets and counters, and then D&D game night.
• Saturday is Labor Day grilling and (card and board) game night at our house.
• Sunday’s goals are making progress on a non-fiction book (Daring Greatly or something else) and starting (and attempting to finish) Chapter 5.
• Monday – we want to do something involving water.  We had originally planned on tubing, but I’m not sure I want to chance it with all the rain.  Instead, I think we have a bike adventure and hit up Barton Springs and Deep Eddy and maybe a few places for snacks along the way.

I’m excited!  Fun stuff is fun!  What amazing things are you doing over your long weekend?