Adjusted Reality

My deep thought of the week:

There is never enough time to do all the things I want to do.  Even when I’m not booked solid with triathlon training.  Even when I don’t have to say no to things the day before a race, or because I need to ride my bike for 2 hours instead of going to do something.  Even when my schedule is pretty fluid and I’m prioritizing fun.

To maintain a few hours a week of activity for fitness purposes and get 8 hours of sleep a night, and work, I still can’t do all the things I want to do.

And it’s kind of freeing.  When I’m back to dedicating those 10+ hours a week to swim, bike, run, weights, stretch, or whatever, I’ll know that it’s not just training making it all busy.  It’s just life throwing an abundance of cool things my way so I can hone my decision making skills to pick what venues I’m going to grace my presence with and what’s worth my time.

I was actually double or triple booked with invites three days last week.  One day work took over and cancelled everything, but the other two – I had to make the decision and both times I went with the choice that was more of a unique experience (a concert vs drinks with friends, and a volunteer party vs friday night slides at the wah pah).  No regrets.  I’d probably make the opposite choices if I was exhausted from training so it was nice to make use of some of the fun offers that come my way.

Tidbits from this week:

Our team successfully launched an update to the general public for one of my games, and an update to our test servers for another.  This is not trivial in terms of effort and stress, and while we still have a bit to go before things calm down completely, it’s been a really epic and positive culmination of the first half of the year of effort from everyone.  Yay!  Just a little bit more to go to finish up the summer madness!

We moved what used to be our itty bitty baby tarantula (not so much any more) into her new home – a 4-serving size mac salad size container.  She seemed a little skittish at first but after a few days and being fed a cricket, she’s been redecorating by moving all the fluff and seems happy.

We finished (well, as much as we could in a short time frame) cleaning stuff out and had our yard sale.  We made ~150$ in about 4 hours, and then gave a bunch of stuff away for free.  We took half the clothing bags to Goodwill, we plan to take the extra bedding to the halfway house, and the rest of the clothes to Savers (for a discount coupon – so I can get MOAR things, heh).

Our AC decided to leak under our flooring so it was ~150$ for the service call to fix it and then eventually we need to replace our laminate in that area.  Bah.  We found this late at night, and tried to sleep with the AC off so it wouldn’t leak any more, but around 4am I relented since I had been up for 2 hours sweating, and turned it on anyway.

Fun Stuff:

Rock Show!  We got free tickets to the Summerland tour, which was a very 90s stadium rock show with American Hi Fi (we got there late and missed them – like, when does a rock show ever start on time?), Fuel, Everclear, and The Toadies.  Fuel was pretty good, though it was hard to understand him mumbling on the mike even more than expected.  Everclear was fun and high energy but the lead singer sounded like he was doing karaoke of himself.  He must have a lot of studio tweaks to his voice.  The Toadies stole the show – I’ve seen them live before and remember them being MEH, and this time they ROCKED.  High energy, fun, singer sounded great… it was a fun night.

Volunteer Party!  We normally don’t go to these, but we wanted to go downtown to stop at our tri store anyway and it was right on the way.  Or so we thought.  When we got to the location where we thought it was, the bar had moved.  To the southiest south part of south Austin.  D’oh!  We got there pretty quickly in the absence of traffic and ate delicious lemon pepper wings, chips and queso, and flautas (seriously, you think a triathlon thingee would have at least ONE vegetable) and some vodka sodas, and mingled with a few triathletes and volunteers we hadn’t met before.

Waterpark!  We got there on Sunday at noon and holy hell it was busy.  We usually go either in the morning or the last few hours of the day, and we’ll go back to that trend because it was nutzo.  But, we did get some slides and lazy river action and wave pool floatin’ so it wasn’t a wasted trip.  We also got some kick ass BBQ on the way back that rocked our socks off.  Best butt in town – yeah, probably for Pflugerville!

Food Stuff:

Week 2 down of trying to cut calories, 2 weeks to go.

1500 calories is not so hard some days, and almost impossible others.  It’s pretty easy during the week when I make my own food (or get selectively healthy/filling takeout), and eat at pretty set times, but sometimes being out and about and the lack of routine on the weekend gets the best of me.

1500 calories leaves very little room for error.  If I’m eating healthy food, it’s just enough.  If I do something like go to a party with only junk food and booze, I have to set aside a fairly decent amount of my daily intake to be able to enjoy it.

1500 calories means I really have to watch my snark meter and keep my attitude in check.  Not training so much, I don’t feel the BELLY HUNGER in the same way, but when everything that comes out of my mouth sounds bitchy, I either need to eat or sleep.

1500 calories flat out does not work for having some beers around noon.  By 6pm I was rationing the calories I had left.  By 9pm, I was grumpy and just wanted to go to bed – I was already at 1800 calories and I felt like I could have gotten down with a whole medium pizza right then.  So I drank some water, went to bed, read my book, and woke up the next morning feeling ok.  I was a little cranky until I got food but I ate a very filling breakfast (footlong subway with just bread, turkey, veggies, and mustard) and life went on.

1500 calories means sometimes I eat what has less calories and will make me not want to start eating my desk rather than the best quality of food (see said Subway sandwich).  It’s a trade off I’m willing to make temporarily but once season starts I’ll be back to less “diet crap”.

1500 calories seems to be working, though, at least a little.  My average calories for last week, as the week before, was 1625.  Funny how that worked out.  I think that’s my metric of challenging, but not impossibly low food consumption.

In turn, I had my lowest average weight since I started tracking of 179.3 – which was 0.8 less than last week and 0.1 less than my lowest of 179.4 a month ago.  It’s really frustrating how damn hard I need to work to take down the smallest amount of weight but it’s better than not trying, I guess.  The last two weeks have gone from 180.7 to 180.1 to 179.3 so I’m hoping that trend continues.

Sweaty Stuff:

Pushup Challenges for the week – done.  Week 2 Day 2 was 10, 12, 9, 9, max (at least 13, I did 15).  Week 2 Day 3 was 12, 13, 10, 10, max (at least 15, I did 17).  I took my post-week 2 test on Sunday, and I failed on the 22nd pushup.

In 3 weeks, I more than doubled the amount of pushups I did.  That does not suck!  I’m also finding it’s much easier on my body – the first week I did it I practically threw out my back, now, while I find the act of it challenging, the after effect is less – just my abs (of all places) are a little sore the day of/after.

Dozen done x2.  Stretched once.  I REALLY need to be better about stretching once season starts but for now I’ll call this a win for the home team.

I ran two unremarkable runs for a total of about 10k.  One was during the noon hours and during feels like 94 and full sun.  I went 2.8 miles and that was about all I had in me at those temps.  One more week before I really need to start braving those hot runs for longer.

The pool got me with its siren song on a 91 and sunny lunch break.  I did ~600m drills with my pool toys and 400m of IM.  My fly still sucks eggs but it’s fun to pretend to be a swimmer.

And, besides some walks, that’s it.  I only logged about 3 hours of for reals stuff on dailymile.  Doin’ offseason right.

What’s up for the last official week of slackitude?  Pretty much trying to do the LEAST amount of stuff that I HAVE to do and the most amount of FUN that I WANT to do.

Workout Stuff:

• Pushups – Week 3 Day 1, 2, 3
• Dozen x 2, maybe x3 if I’m feeling jiggy
• At least 1 run.  If I haven’t forgotten how to run by now, I’m probably ok slacking this week.
• Whatever else sounds fun.  Sup, snorkeling, playing on the bikes in the neighborhood, going on an adventure, whatevs.

Life Stuff:

• Get up before 8 as many times as possible (2/3 so far!)
• One chore: get the garage fridge/freezer empty so we can get rid of it (that means cleaning the other freezer.
• Other than that, relax and have fun as much as humanly possible this week.

Fun Stuff:

• As much time at the water as possible (lake/pool/waterpark)!
• DnD gaming for the first time all month on Thursday!
• Hitting Friday night slides!
• Possibly a (super chill, no drop family type) group ride on Saturday (if we feel like getting up)!
• Friend birthday party hangout fun times!

…and when we speak next, I’ll be transitioning back into being a triathlete.  I keep thinking OMG SO NOT READY when I’m not focusing on just offseason ending in general.  But… when I think about specifically riding my bike up and down Ronald Reagan, or huffing and puffing after an awesome swim set, or yeah, even knocking out a long run and collapsing with some coconut water and chips and beer… I get a little flutter.

The motivation is awakening.  I’m pretty close to ready to start taking this train to Kerrville town…

Sometimes your subconscious knows what’s better for you than your actual plans.  Week 2 was supposed to be a return to routine, but life got in the way of about half of it.  It’s ok.  I probably wasn’t fully ready to do it anyway.  Here’s how life is going.

Pushup Challenge:

This is part 1 of #projectsunsoutgunsout – I may be able to PR the crap out of swim bike run, but I’m at probably personal worsts in terms of strength training progress (since I got fit again – let’s not discuss the no mans land before 2008).  While I feel like a complete wuss because I was only able to string together 9 pushups for my test, I figure you have to start somewhere.

I got a slow start to this, but ended up doing the test on Tuesday, Day 1 Week 1 on Thursday, and Day 2 on Saturday.  I’ll try to see if I can catch up eventually, but even if I’m off and start the weeks on Thursday, it’s better than not doing them, right?

Day 1 was 6, 6, 4, 4, and then max (more than 5 – I did 8).  Looking at that, it seems like so few, but adding it up, it’s 28 pushups.  Day 2 added up to 34.  Considering I was only eeking out 5-10 while I was doing strength before giving up, it’s progress.

Also, I’ve got my officemate and some other folks around the company doing it.  If it’s something I can do on a 5-10 minute break at work, I’m more likely to stick with it.

The Dozen:

This is part 2 of #projectsunsoutgunsout – more overall strength in my core/arms to reinforce the pushups.  I also got a late start on this, but I did manage to do it twice – Thursday and Sunday.  I was going to skip the push up parts, but since I’m trying to train myself to do pushups with my hands parallel to my toes (I currently do them at with my hands angled), I did half the amount of them on my knees.

This is definitely something I can do when I’m at home after work watching TV, as long as I get off my ass and just do it.  Doing that + pushups on the same day made my abs so so so sore, hopefully once I get used to it I can group them on the same day without an issue.

Classes/Other Activity:

I dragged Zliten to a hot yoga class and it made him angry.  I didn’t hate it, but it definitely made my knee weirdly sore.  I may have us work up to it by doing shorter sessions at home or taking a not-hot easier class.

We skipped cycle class due to mental health day reasons and made pretty red white and blue drinks and sat on the patio instead because #offseason.

We slept in and then went to a movie with friends on Wednesday, and the waterpark on Thursday, so… yeah… it was one more week of chillaxin.  I’m ok with that.  Week 2 was about testing the waters on activity, no pressure.

I was able to get 40 mins of cycling and a 3 mile run in my new hokas (I don’t love them yet, but I’ll give them a few more chances), an hour walk, and some stand up paddleboarding, so there is that.

Probably a liiiiittle more this week, but still #offseason.

Food Stuff:

I met with a nutritionist Sunday and it was quite interesting.  His first instinct when I was talking him through everything was “why do you need me here” because I’m pretty knowledgeable about this stuff, but I think he helped me establish some direction and a plan for both offseason and season.

I am going to write up a whole post on this stuff – but the very quick version is:

• Reduced calories while I’m not training hard, purposed for weight loss – aiming for 1500 per day.
• Goal is 100g protein, 45g fats, 25g fiber, and variable carbs depending on my activity level.
• During offseason, this will be ~150g carbs (about normal for me)
• Once I ramp up training, I’m going to be eating a lalalalalot more carbs but I’ll get to that later.

It’s kind of refreshing to feel like I can eat whatever I want as long as I hit my macros.  To be fair, I need to eat mostly healthy to hit them at 1500 calories, but I was able to enjoy a small scoop of ice cream last night guilt free!

Last week was not a huge success in this department.  There was a lot of partying for the holiday (and even before), and while I was active, I wasn’t THAT active.  I think I was also doing the “I’m seeing a nutritionist on Sunday and he’s probably going to tell me to give up everything fun” (which didn’t happen, but whatevs) so I was splurging a little.

• Average calories per day: 1925
• Average weight for the week: 180.7 (+0.8 from last week)
• Fitbit says I had a surplus of about 1500 calories for my activity (though I did spend a lot of time in the water without the fitbit).

So, onward and upward.  It’s a new week and I’m hoping to make some progress with my new plan.

Life Stuff:

I played quarter day hookey and left work early to get a few hours at the water park on Thursday.  Priorities.  It made for a pretty awesome start to the holiday and somehow almost made it feel like a 4 day weekend.  We went back on Saturday for a while too.  Yay wapah!

I got out to paddle and snorkel the lake once on Sunday.  So much water time makes my heart happy!

Hung out with friends three times this week!  We did a dinner and a movie on Wednesday to see Inside Out, and then had a taco cookout on Friday as a pre-4th of July party, and visited some friends and crashed a block party for fireworks.  So fun!

I woke up once at 7:59am.  I stayed up ’til 4am twice.  Eh… there’s always this week.  I actually have reasons to be up earlier most of this week anyway, so hopefully this is the week of the shift.

And that’s a great transition into Week 3 goals:

Activity:

• 1 bike, 1 run
• Dozen x2
• Pushup challenge x3 (week 1 day 3, week 2 day 1 and 2)
• Other things as gravy

Food:

• Hitting my calories and macro goals above.
• Trying to limit alcohol consumption to a reasonable amount, so I can hit my calories and macros.

Life:

• Above all else, get rested.  I’m currently fighting *something*, feeling tired, a little achy, not quite myself.  Don’t push through this to workout if it lingers.
• Earlier bedtimes and lots of sleep this week.
• Relax Sunday after volunteering.  It’s going to be a busy weekend and there is no need to stress out about chores.  Sunday is a chore free day.

Fun stuff:

• Friday night slides!
• Tubing at the comal river with friends
• Parents visit
• Volunteering at Couples Tri

What’s your goal for this week?

Ahhhh, offseason.  This week felt WEIRD but good.  I’m somewhere between not-so-sure I need these next 5 weeks off but know I REALLY need them off to hit this fall and winter HARD.  So, this training block’s goal is REST and FUN and a little dash of building habits.

Also, had to share a Pfluger picture (no way I’m paying 20$ for that, sorry), and they kind of cemented the fact that I was doing all I could on the run.  That. pain. face.

Day 0:

I’m going to go on the record, I liked finishing the last race on a Saturday last year much better, since I had a full weekend to relax.  Sunday just meant I came home, drank beer, ate sandwiches, and didn’t do much since I had to work the next day.  But, don’t get me wrong, it was still glorious.

Day 1:

8 hours of sleep, I probably could have used more.  Still kind of in a head fog.  Nothing feels weird yet since I sometimes take the day off after a race.  Work was busy but then I indulged in:

• Going to the grocery store without a 100% set plan in mind because it wouldn’t be tragic to forget something and have to go back later in the week
• Eating foods that probably wouldn’t have been good for training the next day, like tacos with the spicy ass green sauce and a curry naanwhich.
• Playing video games for 3-4 hours
• Letting the laundry stay piled up in the garage (it stayed there until Saturday).  I could probably do it every other week if it wasn’t for workout clothes.

Day 2:

Slept like the dead and wanted to keep sleeping after 8.5 hours.  Head feels a little clearer, but two days of eating bread and crap is definitely making my stomach feel… bleh.  Back to better food today. My body had gone back and forth from feeling like it’s dragging a big weight, and sometimes sort of… fine.

I’m really busy today, so I’m not yet MISSING a workout, and it feels like a relief not to have to fit one in.  Though the idea of being in a body of water to swim sounds nice, soon.

Today’s fun involves:

• Jurassic World!  Wow, it’s neat to be able to go to movies during the week.  Normally I’m either a) having to train during the movie time or b) getting out of the movie is too late because I have to get up to train.  A movie after work during offseason is TOTALLY doable and it was SO FUN!
• Got our new security system installed.  It was a hassle, but it wasn’t NEARLY the hassle it would have been trying to work an install around a 8 hour work day AND 2+ hours of training that is normal on a Tuesday.
• Not being able to poop but feeling super gassy care of something I ate.  I know, I’m a doll.  You’re welcome.
• A little bit too much wine. 🙂

Day 3:

Today it really feels weird not to be training.  Oddly enough, my first thought about it is I miss chlorine, and I have wistful memories of running (but winter running, not in this humid hot soupy shit).  Work is pretty stressful, so it’s definitely a great week not to have any sort of training stress.

Awesome things about today:

• Pho for lunch!  I haven’t had it in forever, it is hit or miss whether its fine or wrecks me for 2 days.  So, its definitely something I only eat when I’m sure I won’t be training soon.  I also think I found a new favorite place for it, because besides a little bit of sloshy belly (from many cups of spicy broth), I don’t feel awful!
• Yelp Event!  Private party to check out a place I probably wouldn’t ever go myself called Pacific Rim.  Everything was adequate in terms of food and house wine, but they definitely did well in the face of a hungry crowd and we’ll definitely come back and give them a chance.  Good to catch up with old and new Yelp Elite friends as well!
• A bit too much wine and rum, again.  Oops.
• Getting a random level on my EverQuest character while being a little too tipsy to probably have done that.  I logged in a few days later and found that drunk me had not only gotten a level and managed to not die, but I also went all the way to town, obtained a bunch of spells, and made it back to camp.  Go drunk me!

Day 4:

When I was in my 20s, we used to hit up Vegas a lot for vacations.  What do you do in Vegas? Stay up all night, and drink, and gamble, and other debauchery, day after day.  At least that’s what I did.  Somewhere in my early 30s, we shifted away from those types of holidays and elected to spend our time at the beach instead.  Days like today remind me why – staying up and having a little too much booze two days in a row just about SLAYED me.  There’s a reason I don’t do that anymore.  My head was so foggy I walked into the wrong office and started to have a convo with the wrong person at work.

However, it wasn’t all bad.

• It was my 8-a-versary day at work, and a coworker got me balloons.  Things are going well with our new release.  Life is pretty good.
• The evening was game day.  We faced some pretty heavy foes and Zliten’s character got CRUSHED by a statue, and our warlock also met the pointy end of the demise stick.  They were both a little bummed, but then got to creating new characters.  Can’t wait to see who we “meet” next time.
• Our garmin vector 2s came.  I’m pretty excited to start playing with (real) power.
• I had some REALLY good chicken and veggie tikka masala.  Probably a little too much food/carbs/calories, which I AM kind of trying to watch, but it was so tasty.

Day 5:

So happy for Friday.  This week was so busy, I was so ready to enjoy a weekend of just whatever the hell I wanted.  It ended up being very lazy, which was totally fine.

I really missed the water. I spent a whole 5 days since I submerged myself in something deeper than my bathtub, so we headed to the lake after work with my big diving camera rig to go explore.  The visibility was complete shit, but I was able to get some decent pictures because nice camera + BRIIIIIGHT light.  And I swear, time speeds up when I’m in the water, because I SWEAR it had only been 15 mins as we climbed out, and it was an hour later.

We had planned to go on a fun, no drop group ride Saturday morning to test out the Vector 2s, but Zliten’s right pedal was stuck, so we needed bike shop help, so we decided to skip it this week (it didn’t take too much arm twisting), and stay up and play video games and have a few vodkas.

Day 6:

Today was about sleeping in and getting greek food for lunch and going shopping (spent WAYYY too much at the bike shop but hey, it was all on sale, right?) and then finally testing out our pedals on the trainer.  I think mine is overestimating power a bit (I wasn’t working very hard to hit my threshold pace but mayyyybe that’s a week of rest for ya?) and seems to not completely be picking up the right pedal (it clocks me at 60/40% balance when I was doing single leg drills that should register 0/100%).  But… I did get some PRs on Zwift and maintained the gal’s polka dot jersey most of the time.

Zliten grilled us some AMAZING fish and some slightly hockey pucked (but still delicious chicken) for dinner.  I gave myself the weekend to continue being unreasonable with the booze and I made it through all of two beers (ok, 4 Miller 64s, but that actually calories and booze content = 2 real beers so henceforth, so it shall be) and decided that I was ready for reading in bed instead.  I have definitely tired out my “get all the drunk” urges this week.  That was kind of a goal.  I’m ready to do stuff besides wanting to sit on my couch and drink beer all day.

Day 7:

Slept in until 10:30 (which never happens unless I stay up super late or am sick, which I did neither), and we grabbed some soup and salad bar from Jason’s Deli before we did a massive grocery and Costco trip.  Our plan was to unload and then get thees to the waterpark, but we both were kind of weirdly exhausted from errands.

I know this part of the cycle.  Part of unloading fatigue is actually FEELING it and trying not to push through, so we succumbed to the couch instead.  It was sad because I have not seen my waterpark in 2 weeks, but there were perfectly good and err… hormonal reasons I was tired, and Zliten’s knee was creaky, so it was for the good.

As was the theme of the weekend, we grilled some more (steak for Zliten, chicken for me and for the week ahead) and played EverQuest and I got down 1.5 beers before I threw in the towel and read in bed again.

….and fin.

Average calories for the week: 1840 per day

Fitbit says deficit is: 445 calories for the week (lol)

Average weight was: 179.9, which is +0.1 lb from last week.  With that data, race inflamation and that darn TOM starting, it seems about accurate.

And, now we’re here at week 2.  It’s time to bring some more regular FUN activity into my life, but still prioritize personhood over any sort of specific training (e.g. was going to go to a rock climbing class Wednesday but a movie invite with friends came up, so definitely doing THAT instead).  I also need to keep myself from trying to do ALL THE THINGS because I can.  I expect my energy to rebound this week and I’m trying to BANK some each week, not spend it all.

It’s also time to make baby steps at establishing some new habits and reaffirming existing ones.

Nutrition Goals:

• Continue to track calories and weight.
• Eat mostly healthy food – just because it’s in my calorie range does not necessarily mean I should eat it.
• Reduce alcohol consumption to a normal amount for me (a few drinks twice a week max, rather than DRINK ALL THE BOOZE).
• Contact nutritionist to set up an appointment (eeps!)

Workout Goals:

• Hit a couple classes at the gym this week to try something new!
• Run once, 30mins to an hour.  No electronics.
• Get back to some light strength.  Do week 1 of the pushup challenge and go back to the dozen (minus the pushups) 2xweek.  I don’t care so much about getting to 100 pushups.  Last time I got to about 50.  It just seems like the kind of thing I could carve out a few minutes before or after work and do without it having to be a THING like going to the gym to lift.

Life Goals:

• Get my ass to the waterpark once or twice.
• Get my ass to the lake once or twice.
• Hang out with friends.
• Sleep 8 hours a night.  It’s so hard for me to sleep when I’m not training but make it happen.
• Get up in the hour that starts with 7 a few times this week.

Question: what are you up to this week?