Adjusted Reality

The first week and the last week of offseason, I’ve tried to prioritize fun as much as possible over the “omg I have free time lets get do responsible shit”.

There’s a big difference though.  Week 1 – I was walking around kind of zombie-like, decompressing from season, and was excited to DRINK ALL THE BOOZE since I didn’t have to train.  Week 5 – I felt very recovered – but a little stale in the legs from not doing all that much for a while.  I’m kind of sick of DRINKING ALL THE BOOZE (sorta) and am looking forward to returning to the lifestyle where I fall into bed at 9 and zonk out quickly (very).

This was the first week where I kind of felt “is it next week yet?” – so just like last year, I’m thinking that 5 weeks off was just PERFECT to get my body and mind in gear for 6 months of 70.3 and marathon training.

I didn’t do a vacation this year, which was probably BETTER on the body and recovery (that’s coming in OCTOBER!), but I am missing a little bit of the getting-away-from-it-all in the soul.  I’ve been devoting every possible minute possible to being in the lake or at the water park, so I do feel like I’ve had lots of micro-vacations.  So, we’ll see how my head is.

Moving my butt:

Last week was a little more active than I was previously.  It’s ok.  After each session I felt energized and happy, and that’s where I needed to be.

I did my pushups on Tuesday and actually failed the last set of Week 3 Day 1.  I was supposed to do 17, and I kept failing trying to do #14.  On Saturday, I decided to just try to do the descending ladder of the dozen (10, 9, 8… down to 1 – which is 55 pushups) on my toes and yup, I was finally able to do it.  Honestly, that’s what sparked the pushup challenge in the first place, and I think rolling that full, un-modified dozen into my life twice a week will work.  I feel so much stronger, more… sturdy.  I like.

I got to SUP TWICE this week.  I really need to figure out how to make this part of my life during season.  I’m pretty sure it’s amazing core work which you use in, like, everything, plus its SUPER FUN.

I also got to snorkel twice last week and while that probably doesn’t do anything for my training but prevent the “omg I haven’t been in open water in 5 weeks ack nature” shock, it was great for the soul.

I ran a 5k once.  It was hot.  This is probably the part of training I am least looking forward to resuming but I just ripped the bandaid off yesterday with a 5k run in kitty litter when it was about 50000 degrees (ok, feels like 98, but same diff) and I didn’t die.

Outside BIKING omg!  We decided that the last week of offseason was not the time to return to hardcore class, so we took our bikes outside and discovered some really cool new bike lanes just south of our neighborhood that will make for some good interval work if we want to do that outside.  Then, we joined up with a no drop group ride and I think I leveled up a bit with my bike handling and not freaking out about riding in town (by the end – there were some terrifying sections where I straight yelled at cars but it got better).  Neither of these rides went anywhere north of 14 mph, but that wasn’t the point.

Nutrition:

(I took, like, no pictures last week.  Too busy being awesome, I guess. So, you get selfies.)

The increase in activity sort of dragged my calories up a bit without me really noticing.  I still fought pretty hard to keep myself around 1500-ish each day, but I lost more days than I did the week before.  Though… I logged almost double the activity, so I suppose there’s a good reason.

My appetite is definitely RESET though.  I bought two halves of a BBQ chicken breast and a big salad from whole foods.  Two months ago, that would have been a meal where I probably would snack later.  Last week, it was two VERY FILLING meals.  It’s been fun to watch my hungries shrink and soon they will grow to the point where I can embarrass myself with my giant meals again during 70.3 peak training.  Fun stuff.  It’s cool how your body just knows what’s up if you listen to it.

Average calories per day: 1676.  Average weight for the week: 178.2 (which is a full 1.1 lb loss).  Solid.

In the last 2 months, I’ve lost almost 5 lbs chipping away at it almost to slow to notice without me tracking the averages.  I’ve gone from approaching my “oh shit” weight to being pretty comfortably back to what feels NORMAL (maybe the high side of normal but definitely in the zone) the last few years.  I’ve got a few more days here at this calorie count, and then we’ll start ramping up to stuffing my face with (carefully tracked) carbs (at the appropriate times).

I’ve been emailing back and forth with my nutritionist and I think I’ve got my map and my plan in place – through September at least.  More on that next week when it really kicks off.

Another interesting tidbit of calorie reduction + last week of offseason – I was curious so I mathed this one out… over 15% of my calories last week were alcohol.  I don’t eat a whole lot of junk food, so those are my splurges, but WOW.  Now that I’m training again, this will be a much smaller part of my life.

Fun Stuff:

The only responsible thing I did was clean out our freezers.  It took us an hour.  They’re going to come pick up our garage fridge that doesn’t really work for 50$.  Also, now everything in my freezer inside is edible and not 4 year old ground beef or freezerburned crap.  Ick. Yay.

We booked our vacation in October.  We’re going to flippin’ Bonaire!!!  I’m still kind of in shock we were able to do it we had a decent-but-not-sky-high budget to do a dive vacation, and I figured that we might be able to afford Florida, or mayyyybe Cozumel because I didn’t want to stay at a hole in the wall.  Not one of the best places to go dive… but I checked it out just to see what’s what.

Well, I was able to book a flight to Bonaire for about the price of a domestic US ticket, and the accommodations + diving package worked out to cost about the same as the vacation we took to Oregon/California last year.  So, 8 days in Bonaire is fast approaching!!!  Wheee!

Got my running shoe situation for at least the summer/fall dealt with super cheap.  Spent all the savings on one dress I fell in love with at Athleta.  Oh well.  The super genius said it was worth the price with how it fit, so I made him buy it for me because sticker shock.

Did I mention I got to go to the waterpark twice?  And the lake?  Riding my bike twice outside?  Life is good.  I <3 summer so hard (just not summer running).

Went to hang out with a bunch of friends at the bar for a birthday party – sadly, we’d been outside all day and the bar’s AC was either broken or on it’s last legs, so we made it all of 2.5 hours before we had to bail to sit on our couch directly under the AC.  We did bring her an awesome flying pig, so I think we made up for it…

So, offseason shenanigans are official over for a while, and August is about to get REAL.  I think I’m ready for it.

Question: what’s the most fun thing you did last week?

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…