Recovery without beer...

The Ironman has been over since Sunday. Since I quit drinking in August it's the first post Ironman I haven't sabotaged myself by indulging in beer.

It's been an interesting experience. My body went through three phases.

Day One after Ironman I felt nauseous sick. Like a kid who smoked a cigarette for the first time. It lasted all day. I was retaining a lot of water. I took some coconut oil and multi-vitamins.

Day Two I went to the bathroom a lot, body must have been getting rid of power bars, gels and all that good stuff. Still started expelling lots of water. Legs were fine walking, running the thighs were still sore and a shuffle 30 feet would hurt.

Day Three I continued to lose water. I also noticed that I wasn't eating as much. Even though I've been treating myself, last night it was some wings and onion rings, I'm not over eating. More just for taste. Out of 8 - 10 wings I think I ate only 3 or 4 and a healthy salad.

Just what I needed and my body was feeling near recovered to about 75%. I also started seeing myself drop weight. Stomach getting flatter.

I think the big difference by not drinking beer is I was giving my body time to recover without adding stress to it. I've never felt better physically and I really feel great mentally.

Mentally it's also a nice kick start, knowing that you did an Ironman, have got benefits and your still gaining forward movement from those benefits. When I drank beer afterward I really stopped the body from recovering, I was actually putting more stress on it.

The big test for me is going to be the rest of the month. I really want to continue with my training, abeit less hours and maintaining a strong whey protein and supplement post training plan.

The idea is to keep the fitness as close to it is now with much less training so that when I start up again for my next round of Ironman training I'll have a much stronger base to build from.

Equipment wise, I got my new wetsuit today. It was an Xterra. It cost me only $99. It's the less costly model, but my experience is that I prefer the basic wetsuits that are not as thick. I think there is not a lot more if any benefit getting the most expensive models.

No Training - Recovery