After two weeks where I was either puking or shivering, I finally felt better. Just in time for me to do my two week hard segment.

I suppose that’s good.

The thing about the two week hard segment is that it’s like climbing a mountain. When you look at the schedule you feel you are at the bottom of this massive mountain, you look at the exercise, you look at the hours and you wonder: What the f* am I doing here?

By the end of the first week, you’re thinking: I can so totally do this, I rule.

Then you get to the middle of the second week, and you have your long bike and long run and long swim ahead of you and all you can think is: What the f*…

Actually you don’t have enough energy to formulate a coherent thought. Every last ounce of energy is consumed to just keep you alive.

And then it ends, and you look behind you and you think: That wasn’t so bad…

And especially with that down week looking sooooo appetizing.

It’s an amazing cycle this training cycle.

And now for my weight update: 

The sudden spike in weight that you see on the graph above pissed me off.

I was so frustrated with the sudden spike in weight that I did some research on weight loss and ironman training and found this article that said this:

Athletes who complain they “eat like a bird” but fail to lose body fat may simply be under-reporting their food intake. A survey of female marathoners indicated the fatter runners under-reported their food intake more than the leaner ones. Were they oblivious to how much they actually consumed? (2) Or were they too sedentary in the non-exercise hours of their day?

Because I remember eating like a bird, a small tiny bird, I was convinced that my weight loss was due to poor metabolism … But the article suggested that perhaps the issue was my food intake…

So let’s see… There was the pizza for Friday dinner, the chili and the quesadilla for lunch on Saturday, the burger and fries for dinner on Saturday, the amazing brunch my friends prepared on Sunday – scones, cheese, two kinds of vegetable and egg dishes and desert, and the large bucket of popcorn I ate at the movies followed by a nice light salad for dinner.

Erm. Maybe the intake was the issue. Maybe I was eating like a hippo, not a bird..

You know, it turns out that the amount you can burn per week is limited, but the amount you can eat seems unlimited … Even while training for an ultra endurance event, it would appear that proper dieting is essential if I want to lose weight…

Damn.