Heavy and Sweaty

so i am slightly heavier on mondays now.

we have been playing over the last month with eating on bike rides. our energy level has gone up tremendously. the first 3 hours or so feel the same. but the next three are completely different. before they used to be a slow grinding death, but now they are about like the first three hours again. the legs feel great. other parts are still going through the slow death thingy. but at least i am not struggling to keep a slower and slower pace going.

on the other side of that coin my weight is higher on monday mornings. now i am not recovering all day monday so furiously. makes for better rides on sunday and then the week rides are a lot more fun too. so all in all this has been our biggest improvement. wish i had known this 20 years ago... ( or even 20 weeks! )

here is my weight over the last few months: once a week on mondays:

March 22, 2010 198
March 29, 2010 194
April 5, 2010 198
April 12, 2010 194
April 19, 2010 194
April 26, 2010 191
May 3, 2010 192
May 10, 2010 192
May 17, 2010 191
May 24, 2010 188
May 31, 2010 190
June 7, 2010 187
June 14, 2010 187
June 21, 2010 186
June 28, 2010 186
July 5, 2010 185
July 12, 2010 187
July 19, 2010 191

my goal all along was 185 and i think i am going to stick to it. going to watch a bit more what i eat from now one in. kinda been leaning towards the paleo diet - which is pretty high in protein.

also noticed something about being sweaty. a year ago i was bigger and more out of shape - not to say i am in shape, but i was worse off a year ago. and when i worked out i would sweat, ( as i still do lol ) but it was different. i would take longer to start sweating. now i am sweating putting air in the tires. then it would take 30 minutes before i got really going. so i think my body is more ready to get rolling now. and! the other side is true too. then i would be sweaty about 3 hours after working out. i remember sitting on the floor under the ceiling fan for about an hour after a long ride. now i bring a change of clothes and am pretty done sweating about 5 minutes after getting off the bike.

just weird stuff, life is.

and! what did we do this week. not all that much weirdly. we followed the book and had a fairly tough book workout. but we didnt add anything to the weekend like we normally do so all in all it was a pretty easy week.

the worst part of the week was the long swim on the weekend. for the third time in my life i did a lake swim. this time the water was pretty nasty and you couldnt see anything in it. just like the first time i did it. but there was no panic. i really think i am okay in lakes now. we just swam back and forth around the lake a bit. two interesting things happened. 1 - my goggles got full of water, as happens every once in a while, and its rather weird getting them re-set in the middle of the lake. ( read about this in chuck's write up ) and he is right, it is a bit weird treading water and fixing them. as you are almost underwater for some of it. you can lay on your back and float pretty well in a wet suit and if there are no waves you can do it that way. or you can kick a bit and just get a little lucky doing it normal. or! you can bring along a Resa and hold onto that as you do it. trouble is, Resas dont like it too much. i am guessing this is something you can practice about ten times and never have another thought about it. kinda like getting into your clip pedals. and, 2 - my neck is all bloody AGAIN. in the same place. this time i lubbed up with a big wad of vasaline before swimming, to glid that part of the wet suit. no luck. about 30 minutes in it was burning. 45 minutes in and i was on the shore looking at the suit. what a pain. turns out a seam at the top is rough, rough enough to have skin in it now. argh. need a fix on this very seriously soon. i can either fix me with maybe a bandaide type patch on my neck - trying this in a few days. or fix the suit with some kinda patch on the seam. but thats our big trouble with swimming right now.

we plan on taking this friday off going up to michigan and running a full-on ironman. or about 80-90% of one. just to check out our stuff a bit on a really long day. obviously we are not going to do that well time wise as the taper is one day but... we would really like a full run at everything. so... unless there is really bad weather ( when we will move it to sunday ) here is the plan:

get in the water about 8 in the morning ( sounds late but our overhead is about 3 hours to get there and set up and ... well, thats going to have to be it. ) once in the water we do three laps of the lake. which is 2.3 - 2.5 miles based on how much we hug the corners.

move over to bikes ( hopefully with a less than 30 minute trans as the lake is about 1/2 mile from the parking lot and the trans is getting stuff out of the locked car. once on the bikes we ride at least 100-112 miles.

switch to running/walking. again a trans - this time pushing bikes and stuff back into the car. also getting re-loaded food and such. on our feet we would like to do about 20 miles. running the first 10 and walking the second. here is where we are wimping - but i am not sure trying to run a high 20 miles would really be good for us. might take a few weeks to recover and we dont want to get totally blasted, just be out there for a long day.

barring wind i would guess:

1:40 swim
0:30 trans
6:30 ride
5:00 run/walk

there is a half ironman this week in michigan and we were thinking of doing that. but its $250 per person and... i dont know we just feel we can do our own longer workout by ourselves.


SCORES!

mentally: 9 - feel a bit lame about the last two weeks and oddly my weight up from doing a good job eating has me thinking i haven't improved. i should not use weight as a measure of fitness. but otherwise the feel very confident and happy. :-)

physically: 9 - fresh and no pains. had a minor foot roll about a week ago, but is better now. all good. arms a bit weak.

workouts: 7 - lamed them up a bit. ahh well. its too hot out to exercise!!! lol


next week should ( i hope ) be a very interesting one on going longer distances. if we feel really good we might just trot out the last 6 miles on the run and say we are ironmen. odds of that are about 10% though!