This week was a down week. Down weeks are your body’s opportunity to recover from the abuse you inflicted on it. It’s an important process in training for an event like a triathlon. Really important.

Really.

Because once it’s over you’re going to start climbing the mountain of pain. Next week I am hitting 10:20 minutes of exercise.

A brief humble brag

On Friday I set a new personal best during my time trial. This is significant for two reasons:

1. I set a new personal best and that’s always fun.
2. I did it way earlier in my training cycle.

As for the improvement, it was 11 seconds over 5km…

The quantum theory of exercise

Taken from wikipedia: Probability densities corresponding to the wave functions of an electron in a hydrogen atom possessing definite energy levels (increasing from the top of the image to the bottom: n = 1, 2, 3, …) and angular momenta (increasing across from left to right: s, p, d, …). Brighter areas correspond to higher probability density in a position measurement. Such wavefunctions are directly comparable to Chladni’s figures of acoustic modes of vibration in classical physics, and are modes of oscillation as well, possessing a sharp energy and, thus, a definite frequency. The angular momentum and energy are quantized, and take only discrete values like those shown (as is the case for resonant frequencies in acoustics)

One thing I have learned in all of this training is that the amount of training feels very different at different discrete quanta.

Between 0-3 hours it feels like you’re basically just moving your sorry fat ass around or keeping fit. Not training for anything, but staying generally healthy.

At 3-6 hours it feels like you’re actually improving your physical body, you feel good doing the work, and it doesn’t feel like this massive amount of effort. Your body is getting in better shape, you’re feeling tired, but it still feels okay.

From about 7-10 hours, it just sucks. Throw in travel time, setup time, and tear down time, and it feels like a frigging part time job. And the exercise hurts. I mean, hurts. You spend 3 hours on a bicycle in a garage and it just sucks. I mean sucks. Then the next day you go on a 2 hour run, and you’re body is feeling like someone out there better be driving a truck to cripple you… This is just hard frigging work. It’s brutal.

I am not quite sure what 16 hours feels like when training for an Ironman. I will be sure to update you on that.

But it is interesting to note how the way your body and brain react to the discrete levels of training is different. 0-3 hours feels like something I can do whenever, however, without much effort and it feels pointless. 3-6 feels about right and fun. 10 hours feels like I am just a sadist.

I think what it really says is that once I do my first Ironman, it probably will be my last Ironman.

Getting Faster

Did my speed training workout and I improved my 5k time by about 11 seconds. Not bad, not bad at all. My coach believes it’s the training, I am saying it’s the weight 🙂

Speaking of speed training, 30 minutes going all out just sucks. It’s really really hard. And it’s hard mentally because you’re natural instinct is to slow down and stop and you have to keep pushing really hard. And what makes it worse, is that after you’re done with the speed training it feels like you just finished a marathon. A lot of times you end up hurting yourself in new ways because you’re just going faster than you normally do.

*sigh*

Weight update

Progress was made. This week I went through a clothes purge.

Having lost 20 pounds since the last time I bought clothes, I went shopping, and threw out everything that was too big. Something about burning the boats I learned a while ago…

One of the things they never tell you about when you train for a major endurance event is how physically frail you actually feel.

My body feels like it’s breaking down during the two heavy weeks of exercise. On day 1 of the two week stretch, I am feeling awesome and by the end of the two weeks, I feel like every part of my body needs to go into the shop for repair.

No such luck, of course.

I thought it was just my age, and then I read about getting sick while training.

Turns out that heavy workouts have the same effect as a lot of stress on your body, they suppress your immune system.

So then you read this blog post about how while you’re feeling like shit, your body is unable to ward off illnesses … And if you have a kid that means you’re in a for a world of hell.

And if you co-workers who have small kids its worse. You’re going to be sick. A lot.

So while you’re trying to train for this endurance event, have enough brain cells to do your job, and be a quarter decent husband and father, every airborne disease is aiming straight at your weakened body to give it a kick in the gonads.

I mean, seriously. I haven’t been this sick so often in my life. And even if I don’t catch anything, I am feeling so tired that I can’t disambiguate between feeling sick and feeling tired.

And because it’s hard to disambiguate and you learn to power through the pain, you end up doing stupid things. One stupid thing is to do a workout with a fever. And if it’s a swim where you are feeling even a little bit nauseous… let’s just say it can get ugly.

This past Tuesday it took me a while to figure out that the body chills had little to do with the water and everything to do with the fever my son gave me.

So what to do? So I go read the article that made me aware that every two weeks I would feel sick, and it suggested that I avoid small sick children while I am doing heavy workouts. Wonderful. How exactly am I supposed to avoid my son while I am training? And what do I tell my co-workers who are virus vectors: please put on a face mask?

This made me realize I was not in the target demographic of the blogger.

That left me with one option, the stark realization that you train while sick, just slower and less. And hopefully when the damn race comes your body has recovered enough to finish the stupid race.

Sickness and Diets

One of the things about being sick is that my ability to control my eating is limited. My will power is told to not come to the pity party I throw…

So we had a couple of bad days where I was eating a lot of junk so I wouldn’t feel hungry.

Thankfully I acknowledged the data trend and took action.

And the good news is we are still on track …

As I enter that part of my two weeks where my exercise program goes from the insane to the truly crazy (3 hours in a garage biking on a stationary bike – right … normal)… I started to think about weight loss and the fact that my blog seems to be dominated about discussions of food.

When I started this whole insane effort I looked like this:

And yes I look better, and yes I feel better and yes my doctor is happier but will losing weight result in better times?

Will this be  worthwhile? Or am I about to discover that I made this heroic effort and all I accomplished was to look better ..

One question I have about weight loss is how much time do you really get from weighing less?

Unfortunately there is no simple calculator on the internet that inspires vast amount of confidence. The evidence is clear, that as you lose weight your V02 Max improves and that improves your speed … The question of how much is opaque.

The best and most cited calculator I found suggests that for every four pounds you lose you improve your marathon speed by 4 minutes.

So if I lose 44 pounds, I should be able to get a sub-5 hour Athens marathon. And if we consider a less challenging marathon like the Napa Valley Marathon I should be able to get to less than 4:30 minutes.

The problem with this kind of equation is that I don’t know if the calculation correctly accounts for the fact that you’re just less tired after carrying less weight.

Last year maintaining a sub 2:30 hour pace in a half marathon was a chore but do-able. Going that hard for 5 hours was impossible and it felt like it was impossible because of the weight I was lugging around.

And the problem with this kind of calculator is that it doesn’t account for hills. There is no doubt that weighing less is crucial for going faster uphill and my target marathon has a lot of uphills…

But regardless in the worst case, every time I lose a pound I am improving my speed by one minute. Sweet.

And here’s the weight update

We dropped a few more pounds than I would have liked this past two weeks. Probably a function of the exercise and the new-found focus on eating properly.

One thing I have begun to do is pay much closer attention to weight movements in the wrong direction immediately rather than ignore them… The upward weight movements are an early signal that I am not taking my eating correctly. Too much upward movement and we declare a code red …

Last weekend my family and our in-laws went to Lake Tahoe to go skiing.

The skiing was awesome.

One of the key parts of the ski trip, in my mind, is the food at Ikeda’s.

For those in the know, Ikeda’s makes the worlds most awesome greasy burgers on the planet. Great meat, great ingredients, a large dollop of grease and you have heavenly food.

Except …

Well it turns out that all of the healthy eating I have been engaged in has destroyed my ability to successfully digest an Ikeda’s mushroom burger.

I ate the damn thing and puked my guts out.

It turns out that your stomach produces the bacteria that you are most likely to require to digest food. When you abruptly change your diet, your stomach has to work extra hard to digest food and that causes bloating, stomach pains etc.

And in my case, vomit.

So not only has this training made it impossible to enjoy cookies, I can’t enjoy a damn burger at Ikeda’s.

Damn you.

And here’s my weight chart.

Good progress.

When I was in highschool I weighed between 78-82Kg (or 171-180 pounds). Then I went to college, and because I was exposed to the high sugar, high fat western diet and had very poor control of my eating habits I put on about 80 pounds and topping at 262 pounds around my 26th birthday.

Around my 26th birthday, I decided I had to do something. So I did. I dropped close to 52 pounds. It wasn’t rocket science, really. I ate less for 6 months. I exercised a lot. And I lost weight. My wife was super supportive. I had to start exercising, so she went on walks with me in the morning until I was fit enough to actually exercise on my own.

For the last 15 years my weight has bounced between 215-235 pounds. I never got much below 215, and I never got much above 235…

I hate going on a diet. Going on a diet is a struggle with my brain. My brain is wired to want to eat sugary, fatty foods in large quantities. I love food. I love it. Every minute of every day, I have to remind myself to not do what I want to do it. It’s like trying to learn how to be left handed after a lifetime of being a righty. It never feels normal or easy or right.

Over the last 15 years, I have had this delusion that if I could just exercise enough, then I could eat whatever I wanted. I imagined I could construct this perpetual motion engine that would always consume enough calories and let me eat without being at war.

And it was a powerful delusion. Application of even trivial amounts of common sense can demonstrate how silly that delusion was. But that delusion existed.

That delusion was my big rock candy mountain…

The power of my brain to ignore the facts was powerful. I was staring at data, but I refused to acknowledge it. I lived in this delusional world where all I had to do was amp up the exercise regime and magically the weight loss would happen.

The notion that calorie intake had any role to play was… well absurd …

Last week finally shattered my illusions. I feel like Neo in the Matrix right after I swallowed the red pill…

The discipline I need to complete my Ironman also involves going to war with my brain over my eating habits.

And for a moment, I wanted to give up this stupid quest. And then I chose not to.

Eating is a choice. I can choose to lose that struggle and not complete my goals or I can choose to win.

So to winning.

Forward progress in this week’s update.

You can clearly see the moment where I finally saw the matrix. After that point, I refocused my energy on calorie intake and returned to my weight loss.

There is no magic perpetual motion machine, just discipline and rigor.

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.

The last week was a bit of mess. This is me today, and I don’t look so good…

Last weekend I got sick. And although I thought I had recovered, the reality was that my calorie deprivation let me a mess. My brain was functioning at about 20% efficiency, and my body was about 30%.

As someone whose job it is to think, watching your brain just shut down because of a shortage of calories is disturbing.

By Wednesday I was fine, my brain was back to normal, my fitness was normal, just in time for me to get a cold. On Thursday, I tried really really hard to fight the cold and did my workout. But Friday I had to admit defeat. On Saturday, I was so defeated that I took some DayQuil.

Today I am feeling good. Not good enough to train, but good enough to think that tomorrow I can start training.

And now for my weekly weight update:

The good new is that we are still on track. The goal was to lose about a pound a week, and we’re still doing that. Last week I was at 215ish pounds, this week I am at 214ish pounds. At the current rate I should get to 195 before my half-ironman…

This week was rough.

We got a new puppy, the exercise regime got ramped, I had an offsite and I almost got sick.

The puppy is a cut 8 week old labrador named Kipling (after the author). He’s black and he’s a darling. I am soooo in love.

Unfortunately, the puppy his first night at my house decided to whine all night long. As a result I got a very poor night sleep. Slather poor sleep, extra workout and not eating enough and you have illness.

The illness didn’t stop me from trying to do my workout but … Man almost puking in the pool wasn’t fun.

Fortunately, I got over my illness pretty quickly. A lot of sleep was the key. And I mean a lot.

The crescendo of misery ended this weekend with the Superbowl. Watching Seattle destroy the Broncos was frustrating. I know the 49ers could have beaten Peyton. Sigh.

Like every good triathlete, after drinking some beer and some booze, eating my wife’s amazing food I went for a swim.

Turns out that a swim on booze and food is slower than when you don’t imbibe booze… Funny that. Last week same workout took 40 minutes, this week 45…

The week’s over. No more illness. No more binge eating. Only 9 workouts.

What? 9 workouts? This is insane…

Here’s the weight data:

Good news is that week over week we lost a pound, and over the last four weeks we’ve dropped four pounds. Progress!!!!!

The downside is that we still have moments of overeating. I really need to get a handle on the binge food eating. It’s killing my weight loss program.

About a year ago, I discovered the importance of the use of hips. 

You needed to have the flexibility to rotate your core so that the force of the rotation would propel you forward.

So if you could imagine the smoothest nut going over the smoothest bolt that should give you an image of what your hips could feel like.

Mine feel like this:

A rusted, broken down, nut on a screw that can’t be moved without breaking it.

40 years of inattention, sitting at a computer, and biking have left me with what I believe are microscopic hip flexors.

And the weight graph

This week we made some progress. 

Notice the dark blue trend line, we are down one pound week over week, and two pounds since the start of the training.

What’s interesting is a pattern has started to emerge. On Thursday and Friday I tend to drop down because of my long bike and run, while on Saturday and Sunday the weight goes up because of my rest day.

If you’re from San Francisco you know about the all great and powerful Panda.

Pedro Sandoval, a great first baseman, has struggled with his weight.

One year he’s at the top of the world, the next year he’s so slow molasses can roll up hill faster than he can waddle from home to first.

Life just sucks.

And you look at this guy, and you think how much money he has riding on his body, that you think: Dude, lose some fucking weight, c’mon.

So he gets himself some professional help and he loses some weight, but then puts it right back on.

Because it turns out losing weight and being an athlete, even an amature one is hard.

Cry me a river, I suppose.

(cry me a river by alan rutherford).

This week was a pain in the ass. You don’t eat enough and you get so hungry so fast and so irritable that your co-workers think they are in a Hitler parody with you as Hitler and them as the Nazi high command. You eat too much and you’re not losing weight.

It’s a frigging fine line. And if you are a professional athlete, if you don’t eat enough and don’t perform well enough you lose your job, I just fail to complete my events.This makes your body feel like a frigging machine with no dial telling you how much gas it needs.

I worry that I am like an alcoholic to everyone, except my drink of choice is kale. And people who eat Kale are a lot less fun.

So anyways, this week was not a success. We didn’t gain any weight, but we didn’t lose any weight. And we had to write one “I am sorry for my flame” email…

And without further ado here’s the weight graph… to make this fun try and guess on which day I was most likely to have killed someone …

If you guessed the 18th of the January you win 🙂

Meh.

Let’s be more disciplined this week.