Lesson Taught But Not Learned

22 Days

Last Week's Totals (Rest week)
Swim: 3400 yards
Bike: 139.9 miles
Run: 20 miles

I've always been one of those people that has never had to watch what they eat. The only way that I do watch what I eat is as the food enters my mouth, from there it was of no regard to me whatsoever. I've never weighed over 140 lbs. and even before training couldn't gain weight if I tried (which I did). I don't say this to brag but to point out in this post that this "blessing" is not as much of a blessing as you might think it is.

Since I started training and racing triathlons a few years ago I've lived by the adage: "If the furnace is hot enough it will burn anything", meaning that if you're working out and training then your body will use whatever fuel you provide it. I still believe that this is true to a point but have learned many times that doesn't mean your body will burn the fuel efficiently.

In my last post I said that I had a back up plan for my botched weekend long ride. That plan was to call in "sick" to work (with my bosses permission) on Wednesday and head up to Muenster (1 hour drive NW) for 115 miles of hills. Muenster is a great place to get a long ride, hilly in. Each April this German town hosts a road rally in conjunction with their German festival. So you go out and ride, then come back and eat your weight in bratwurst. That's my idea of a perfect weekend. Unfortunately it had been a number of weeks since I had been out there and they've been doing some road construction so the roads were so rough that they actually unscrewed my bottle cages and then proceeded to tighten them again.

115 miles is a tough distance both mentally and physically, especially when you're out there all alone. Heading north with the wind was so very nice. I ended up averaging 19.7 mph for the first 25 miles. But then I had to turn south for the long 25 mile journey into the wind. This is when my head started to mess with me and doubt started leaking in. It was understandable to start getting tired fighting the wind for over an hour and a half but I was more tired than I should have been and my motivation and confidence were fading. It wasn't until mile 75 that I started to realized what was going on. Again.

What clicked in my mind around mile 75 was what I ate for dinner the night before. I went over to Jonathan and Milina's house for dinner to watch the MMA fights and play with the kids, this used to be a weekly occurrence before Ironman training started. The standard dinner all the years that we've been doing this is homemade pizza but this time Milina also made fried pickles (I love fried pickles). This pre-ride dinner was definitely not sufficient for the next days training ride and I started to bonk around mile 85 and knew that I didn't have 30 more quality miles left in me. I even ended up calling Kati at one point for a little encouragement, that's when you know things are going down hill (I wished that I was going down hill). In the end I decided to cut my losses and call the ride done at 103 miles. 12 more miles might not seems like that much further to go but when your head is in a bad place 12 miles is an eternity away - that and I still had to go for a short run, which went surprisingly well considering how the ride went.

Since that ride I have been thinking a lot more about nutrition, what I eat and what I should be eating in order to fuel myself and perform the way that I want to and know I can. My coach read somewhere that a person doing 15 hour training weeks (this week will be somewhere around 17 hours) needs to be taking in 9 grams of carbs per kilogram of weight. That means that I need to get about 573 grams of carbs per day, that's almost 2,300 calories in carbs alone. That's the average, moderately active 30 year old's entire daily allotment of calories just in carbs. I can't imagine that I was getting this and even if I was they weren't good carbs.

So since that fateful day on the bike I have been really watching what I eat. Eating whole grain breads, whole grain brown rice, quinoa, fruits and vegetables with lunch and dinner, less Dr. Pepper and less refined or processed foods. I have found that this new diet is quite a bit more expensive though - why is it so cheap to eat crap foods? I wish that I would have learned this lesson the first few times that it was taught so I had time to compare older workouts to workouts on this new diet but there aren't too many more long workouts left.

Don't worry though I still enjoy my ice cream most nights and a few Chips Ahoy Soft Batch cookies each day. So I haven't completely fallen off the wagon.