Time to get back at it…

Since Ironman Cozumel on Sunday I’ve not over-eaten but I have eaten anything I want too. I’ve had traditional breakfasts with sausages and pancakes, breads, pasta, even some chicken wings and last night an ice cream style yogurt cone.

About 20 minutes after finishing the yogurt cone I could feel the sugar rush and mentally I didn’t feel great. It would have been better if I ate half for taste and thrown away the rest. I didn’t. I felt I was sabotaging my gains. That I went too far.

This morning I woke up and I still felt a little crappy from the sugar rush the night before and the mental guilt. I could tell physically it got me off of fat burning and into fat storing. I knew I needed to reverse this.

Today I made the commitment to get back onto the eating healthy wagon.

No breakfast. I wasn’t hungry. A salad for lunch and a sandwich and apple pieces on the plane ride home. I had some pistasho’s and a small amount of beef jerkey as a snack. That’s it.

Physically I’ve decided I’m going to get back to the gym tomorrow. I don’t want to lose the gains I’ve made. It’s been my experience that so long as you work out at least every third day you will maintain muscle. If you go beyond three days you start losing muscle.

For example, if you run on Monday so long as you run again on Thursday you will not lose muscle. If you don’t run on Thursday you will start to lose muscle. And even 10 minutes of training every 3^rd day will keep you retaining muscle.

My plan is to get into the gym and do some light running, biking and swimming. I’ll set up my schedule for the week and probably do 3 sessions of each for 30 – 50 minutes each week.

The way I’ll measure if I’m overdoing it is by my happiness factor. If I look forward to training I’m good. If not, I need to miss a session or reduce the time spent doing it.

As I’ve trained more and more you learn from experience and learn to tap into your intuition. Following your gut or intuition is hard. The mind wants rules and plans and we all want to be told what to do. Training with intuition is an art.

Any good training plan needs to involve the science and the art. You need to start with a plan, you need to have the courage to adjust the plan based on how you are intuitively feeling.

For me it’s taken about 7-years of hard core training to understand that the art of intutition is just as strong as the science of having a plan.

My intuition signal is simple. If I mentally do long look forward to a work out I adjust. Sometimes it’s not doing a long ride EVERY weekend. I might skip one weekend so I look forward to the next weekend.

Other times it’s missing or reducing a workout all together.

Whatever it is in the form of adjustment it’s guided by the level of excitement I have to wanting to train.

Now this is not about cancelling a workout because you’re not motivated. This is part of the art. Are you wanting to miss or shorten a workout because you are not motivated, or is it because your body and mind is fatigued?

If it’s lack of motivation….get your ass out the door.

If it’s mental or body fatigue…adjust according to your intuition. You just don’t automatically miss a workout. You assess…do I miss it? Do I shorten it? Do I still do it?

So here I am. I’m looking forward to getting back to training even though it’s just 5-days after an Ironman. But I know intuitively I need to do it all based on enjoyment. I know I need to recover and recovery training should be mentally fun and enjoyable.

Picture of the day is of a trip I made to the google campus today. Really cool. I think the oldest person I saw was about 28 years old. 

No Training – Recovery Day.