Adjusted Reality

It’s really time for vacation, folks.  My last one got a little interrupted and the last half was kinda ruined with crappy work news, so I just decided that I’m going to remove facebook (and maybe twitter) from my phone during our Colorado trip.  I don’t even want the temptation.  I’m pretty sure I’ll have more interesting things to look at than the millionth political update about Bill Clinton’s love of balloons while hanging out in pretty places.

I’ll still have my Instagram and Pokemon GO.  I’m not going 1991 or anything, just wanting to keep my reality in a bubble for a while.

Wandering to pretty places on the bike helps. 

But yes, it’s time.  I’m feeling that sweet, sweet burnout with a huge side of wanderlust.  I may have stayed up a little a lot too late Sunday because I needed another weekend day.  It couldn’t possibly have been time to start another one of these week things when I’d just barely finished my to do list around 10:30pm.  I need another weekend day now that I’ve started training, or a little less ambition on the life front.  One of the two.  Sadly, I foresee neither.

Dissecting the issue of the quickly evaporating weekend is tough, because it actually was a pretty perfect one from start to *almost* finish.  Saturday morning, we woke up, and joined about 100 of our closest friends at Bicycle Sport Shop to ride 60+ miles around Austin and collect cards from every BSS store to form a poker hand.

The ride was absolutely the most fun on a bike I’ve had in a while until about mile 55 with the heat and the tireds.  The thing I wanted to do most with every little beat of my heart is just get to the fucking finish already, but with a group, it’s about pacing, patience, and a dash of not falling off your bike into traffic.  Considering my previous longest outdoor ride in nine months since Kerrville was 22 miles a few weeks ago (and my two longest indoor rides were 3 hours and 1.5 hours), I’m going to call finishing 64 miles in under 5 hours and feeling pretty much *just fine* for most of it a huge win.

From our first stop at the new store, 13 miles into the day.

The best part?  I’ve been dreaming of the next time I get to take a long ride like that, and what routes I can go play bikes on for 60, 70, 100 miles.  I also know that given another month and a half, it won’t be so deathly hot (one of our temperature readings was 112 at some point – probably a little inflated, like a car sitting in the sun reads a little hot, but not too far off from the feels like at the end…), and I can go ride my bike all day and it will be awesome.  This is a good place to be.

After the ride, we pretty much just vegged on the couch and ate all the food.  I did laundry and stretched a little, but I forgot the rule about long workout Saturdays – they take up the whole day.  Not due to the actual workouts, but the fact that you’re so incredibly zonked after.

Then, Sunday.  It started so promising.  I went to bed early (for a Saturday) and my eyes just opened at 9am feeling rested.  I finished my book, painted my toenails, plucked my brows, started with finally processing and editing the fish pictures from vacation.  Then, once Zliten got up, it became a day of happy things for me, as we ate mongolian grill for lunch, hit the wah pah lazy river for an hour, and then rode bikes all over our hood to do errands and go terrorize some pokemans.

My summer happy place.

Then somehow it was 6pm.  And I hadn’t batch cooked yet.  And I had a LOT of batch cooking to do.  Fuuuuuu!  I like cooking and all, but it took about 4 hours total of prep and cooking and cooling to make ham, cheddar, and broccoli breakfast oatmeal muffins (yes, they are as weird and amazing as they sound), a giant pan of meat and veggie lasagna, and a slightly less giant but still large pan of lightened up chicken cordon bleu rice casserole (which is also as weird and wonderful as it sounds).  I didn’t even get to the potato leek soup but I did get to real life leekspin, and sing the song, so it wasn’t a total loss.

I was able to get my vacation photos done and uploaded during the cooking process too, but once I finished, it was 10pm, I felt like I didn’t get any time to relax, so I poured a glass of wine.

Unfortunately, somehow this lead to us talking work, business, our future, and watching weight loss stories on You Tube at 3am instead of sleeping like we should have.    This is a good lesson for me.  I may be megamaniacal and can get through the to do list no matter what if that’s what it takes, but fucked if I’m not going to rebel after it’s done and self destruct, ruining the next day.

If I go into business with myself as the boss someday, I will need to set up some strict rules with myself.  Not about being productive, though I’m sure I’ll have to monitor that too.  I’ll also have to keep myself from being TOO productive.  I know there would be a huge temptation to work 24/7 when I have the freedom, the flexibility, and my livelihood on the line solely based on how much I hustle.  I’ll need weekly to do lists not just to be productive but to save me from myself.

It’s probably a good lesson to learn about myself when the only thing I’ve sacrificed a little sleep and will have to scramble to reswizzle this week’s workouts while still keeping the rest element to the latter part of the week.  Duly noted, subconscious.

And, since you’ve made it this far into my tale of woe and enlightenment, I’ll try wrap up the details quickly and move on.

Training:

If I didn’t take a bike selfie, training didn’t actually occur.  This is my theory.

Last week was week 2 of the second training block.  Focus was mostly pushing that 10+ hours per week volume, lots of bike volume specifically, and figuring out where my edges are.  I broke on Wednesday (my legs were not my own after two hard workouts) and had to lighten up the mid-week a little, I ditched a 4 mile run and took my weekday brick easy instead of speedy.  However, I got a lot of butt-in-saddle time, I even rode all 3 of my bikes, and there’s plenty of time to get that run fitness back, right?

• Monday: weights + 1 hour trainer workout (40 mins of alternating huge resistance and high cadence, oof)
• Tuesday: 1500m pool swim (just continuous), 6 mile treadmill long run (which I actually cooked pretty hard)
• Wednesday: 1500m pool swim with toys (pull, kick, paddles, fins, fulcrum), home weights
• Thursday: easy 30 min trainer on TT, easy 2 mile run
• Friday: off
• Saturday: El Diablo Poker Ride – 64 miles in about 4:45 on Evilbike.
• Sunday: 5.5 mile recovery ride on the cruisers.

This week is one of those split recovery weeks, so somewhere about Wednesday afternoon things will start to get pretty chill around here resting up for the race this weekend.

• Monday: off
• Tuesday: 5 mile run, endurance cycle
• Wednesday: weights, and either the recovery ride, brick taken a little easier than normal, or some other non-killer riding
• Thursday: off
• Friday: 3 mile run, home weights
• Saturday: 3750m swim (the swim challenge… not necessarily my normal race prep)
• Sunday: RACE! 500m swim, 12 mile bike, 3 mile run.

Food:

Normally, this is junk food.  On the bike, it’s wonderful energy that got me through the middle miles of my 5 hour ride without being cyborg boob milk.

I tracked well, I ate well, I maintained -1000 calorie balance for 6 days out of the week (Mon-Sat).  Then Sunday happened and I totally failed to track and drank too much booze.  I completely erased my debt of -1000 that day.  That’s the bad news.  The good news is that even with that failure, I had a weekly debt of -5800.  That doesn’t suck.

I did much better with my 5 fruit and veggies goal, I hit it all the weekdays (and even ate more than normal during the weekend, baby steps).  At this point, I think these are pretty good weekly goals, so I’ll stick with them. Five fruits and veggies a day.  As close to -1000 deficit as I can stand while training.  Eat mostly home food, since I stressed myself out cooking all the foods, I may as well benefit from it.

Next week, I will have a lot of leftovers and I hopefully should not have to cook at all.  I’m going to have to pull out the easier recipes for a while after this week.  I’m thinking one thing from scratch as a more interesting meal per week instead of a bunch of things.

My weight has been holding at 183 (on mean white scale) average for 2 weeks, but I still think it’s progress.  Two weeks ago I skipped a few days of weighing because I felt like my weight was up.  Last week I hit every day between 181-184.  My body fat has also come down about 1% in the last week.  This feels like that period of time where I stabilize and then drop a little more soon (after this week, because TOM).  I’m ready for the 170s, bring ’em on!  I start feeling like I’m looking good and then I’ll see myself in a non-flattering photo or video and go, YEP, I look better but there’s still some work to do.  That’s ok.  I’m doing the work.  The payoff will come.

Life:

Just, y’know, hanging out with a giant watermelon popsicle.  As you do.

Let’s just say it was the best of times, and the worst of times.  I also noticed I didn’t make a goals list last week, so I just tried to do errrrrrrrything.  Also noted.  I’ll try not to do that again.

Things I accomplished last week of note:

• Took two practice tests for the Personal Trainer stuff.  Found out I remember everything else besides the actual anatomy part (shoulder and hips are HARD, yo).
• Finally gave myself a pedicure and painted my toenails.  Fun fact: I’ve never had one in a salon.  For some reason, feels like a weird thing to pay for.  I haven’t touched them since May, so it was totally time.
• Did more girly stuff and plucked my brows.  After seeing this picture from last week, it needed to happen.
• Yet MORE girly stuff – bought some new jeans for Colorado (I won’t be wearing jeans here until October/November, probably…).  Ladies, can we just agree that low rise skinny jeans are the worst and boycott them?  They just don’t look good on anyone except models.  Boot cut mid rise for life.
• Like I mentioned… finally uploaded my diving and snorkeling pictures.  Had some flashbacks about how horribly hung over and angry I was that day (snorkeling was one day after we found out about the layoffs).  However, I got some really nice shots both days, so it was worth it!
• Bought my new Hoka Cliftons.  Come on 3s, you have to be so much better than the 2s.  I’m excited to get some miles in them on the treadmill to see if I need to return them or not.
• Gaming!  We said bon voyage to a friend that’s moving and welcomed another person into our little group.  Sunrise, sunset.

This week, here’s my list:

• More practice tests and scheduling our actual exam sometime before vacation.
• Booking December vacation.  I don’t want to lose the perfect condo on the right day…
• Progress on my super secret plan long term plan for world domination through exploring basic marketing principles.
• Clean out the leezard’s cage area and get her a new light.
• Get good sleep and prioritize recovery chill vibes to inspire excellent racing on Sunday!

And on that last kinda sounds-like-Bill-and-Ted’s-excellent-adventure bullet point?  I’m out.  Be excellent to each other.