Trains, Travels

Four more days of an office job, though at this point it’s hard to describe those 4 days as work. Then it’s the life of a full time athlete! I want to stress though that this isn’t a vacation. In fact when I get the impression that people think it’s a long holiday it just slightly annoys me.

I’ll admit it has a lot in common with a vacation. I’m going away somewhere with a nicer climate, there are beaches there, I’ll probably spend sometime on them too and will even get a tan. OK, I’ll not have an income to speak of, nor any serious obligations to others to worry about. If I want to I can go out to a coffee shop in the middle of the morning and spend a few hours drinking, eating cheesecake (in moderation of course) and reading the paper. I’ll likely do the grocery shopping at the same time as pensioners, housewives and the unemployed… And I will be travelling about quite a bit too.

But really, it’s not a vacation. Vacations don’t have weekly training schedules to be planned. Most people have no need to measure their progress throughout the course of their holidays. Generally the metric of a success for a holiday is simply, did you have a nice time? Though I can see an argument for that being a better success metric than the many that we normally apply, but generally you don’t ask whether you had a nice time in the office. I’m almost trapping myself here, because I want to be able to look back on my year and say I had a nice time (hopefully something a bit stronger than that).

It’s not a vacation because vacations don’t have goals and objectives. It’s not truly working either because my schedule and free time is my own. It’s some halfway point which probably has a name, but I don’t know it. I certainly don’t like the term ‘career break’ as it makes me think of self-righteous middle-class people rushing off to the middle of nowhere to do something worthy. Which has its place and is a positive thing, but in my mind is linked in with the image of vacant trustafarians getting excited because they spent 5 days building a hut out of twigs.

On the other hand I can’t help, but enjoy the jealousy inducing power of mentioning I’m taking a year out from work. It somehow comes up in conversation quite quickly, in my defence because people often ask me what I do. Generally the answer to that question works better with other athletes, there’s an appreciation of the motivation and what’s actually involved. With those who don’t do a sport it’s harder to explain, sometimes to the point of not bothering. Visiting a financial advisor at my bank recently was a bizarre experience. I just wanted to make sure my money was in the right accounts for my plans, instead I spent half an hour talking about going to Australia before he noted down the 2 things he thought I should do with my money. I didn’t mind that so much, except for the assumption that the trip simply involved drinking on the beach for 365 days.

To contrast with that I tried out another newly opened local lake (they all seem to be coming at once) at the weekend. Seems like a nice set-up and starting out along the right lines. Chatting with the guys behind it there was that hint of envy that I’ve got the opportunity to do this, but they got it entirely. A good 15 minutes was spent discussing how restricting office work and commuting is and how little time it leaves you to get on with your life. They didn’t see it as a vacation, it’s just ordering your life around what’s important to you and what you enjoy. I’m fortunate to be in a position to do this now without having any real burden or significant cost associated with the change. If anything makes this seem like a vacation it’s that circumstances mean I’ve had to work less to achieve this than I would have expected.

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At the start of the year I spent the first month or two training and being very controlled about my diet. The result was I dropped below my previous race weight. As the months went on and with big training camps the amount I was eating justifiably increased. The problem comes when you have easier weeks, recovery and tapers and you don’t adapt your diet enough. So this post is at least partly about my favourite topic and not about the sub-mediocre Simon Pegg comedy I was glad I didn’t pay to see.

Standing on the gym scales this week confirmed my suspicion that it was time to revisit my diet and cut back a little. So now I’m avoiding bread as much as possible, no more cheese and low fat options as much as I can. Plenty of fruit and veg, no limits on that, but generally a lower volume of food. The details are something I’ve not always been good at in my training, slacking off on these isn’t an option any more. I’m not setting or stating a particular weight goal, I need to lose a couple of kilos at least. It’s more important to adapt to a sustainable, lower fat diet that can deliver my nutritional needs. Cutting calories is easy when you’re starting back into training with low intensity and volume.

To an extent it’s true that when you’re training all out you can pretty much eat what you like. Calorific demands go way up as does the micro nutritional needs. On Epic Camp I ate as much as I could, more concerned about lacking the energy to keep training than the potential effects on my waistline. Despite the huge amount of energy I expended each day I did gain weight, I wonder in part if this wasn’t to do with the way some of those calories were spread. I tended to binge at meals and eat a minimum throughout the day, better even snacking (just like the dieticians recommend) might reduce the actual amount I ate whilst maintaining more even energy levels. Towards the end of the camp as I suffered more I started to think about the link between energy levels and mood and wonder if I should be eating more. It’s tough to get enough calories when you’re hanging on to the back of the group though!

A period of lighter training is the ideal time for me to sort this out. With the lower calorific demands there’s less impact to adjusting the diet, but I’m getting some sense of what is and isn’t going to work. What I then have to do is take the good practices forward into my heavier training periods. No more junk calories to meet my daily needs. I’ll allow the occasional treat, at the very least I can’t entirely go without an occasional slice of my favourite New York Baked Cheesecake. Last year in Oz this almost became a daily habit and perhaps that was taking things too far!

Having mentioned waistlines I’ll leave the topic by stressing it’s not that I’m really fat. By everyday standards I’m in a perfectly healthy weight range, with the way things are going I’m probably considered thin. From the perspective of racing to my best I am not going into my races at my ideal weight and compared to when I was just running I’m a heavyweight! Admittedly a good portion of that is the muscle required to swim and bike to a reasonable standard so I can’t look at my running days as a guide. It’s all about the body composition for racing and training at my best, whatever weight that might mean.

Also relating to the title I’m back to regular training, without too much structure. I’m sticking to an easy run everyday this week, nothing too far just 30 minutes or so. Then mixing in some swimming and biking with that again going by overall feel and not concerning myself with effort level too much. I’ll carry this into next week, but increase the duration a little. Then I’ll have a long ride a week Friday to celebrate my first day as a full time athlete. Yep, just one more week to go now.

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Can’t say for certain, but it feels a little bit like I’ve peaked this weekend rather than last. Perhaps it’s just the advantage of several days rest and recovery. My muscles are still sore and hold me back from doing to much right now, but at the same time the rest of me feels fired up. If it weren’t for the race last week I’d be ready to go this weekend. So perhaps I got something wrong there and still had too much fatigue in my system come race day or maybe I’m just better rested right now.

On the positive side of things motivation is here in a way it’s not normally been post-race. I’m ready to train and race again when my body will let me. I feel I’ve recovered mentally and physically from this race far more quickly than my previous two. It’s all good, I’ll start back on a training regime of easy swim, bike and run for the next couple of weeks. I’m also watching what I eat and leaning myself out a bit I was definitely leaner earlier in the season.

Despite a race I’m not too happy with I’m entered into Ironman Western Australia and will be going after the 9:30 goal again. Right now, with the bonus motivation I’m fairly positive I can be ready to do that come December. Going over the figures from Switzerland and comparing them with Austria for both the bike and run my relative position in the field has improved, times may be lower, but I was further up the field than others. What does that mean? Well if I assume that for any of the European fields the range of athletes is effectively the same, so you’ve roughly the same distribution of really fast guys through to pretty slow guys then I’ve moved up that curve. If the assumption is reasonable then that supports the view that I have improved and faced a tougher race. The format that Switzerland puts its results in makes it a bit slow to actually compare athlete distributions so I’ve not gone that far. True or false I’ll cling to the hope that I faced a tougher challenge.

Anyway it’s time to put the race behind me and get on with things, I didn’t reach my goals this time, but feel strangely relieved by this. I was getting far to stressed by things lately and as someone who hates stress it wasn’t ideal. Having got past the race the pressure is gone and I can get on with things. I’ve dealt with the failure and it’s really not that bad.

Training has dominated the blog over the past few weeks, or if not specifically that, thoughts about it and my race. With a week of recovery I haven’t done much training and I’ve gone over my plans so much lately they’re even going to bore me. The downside is that outside of the time training my life actually is quite boring right now! I can tell you I’ve done some pretty good crosswords lately and I’ve also watched some pretty trashy TV.

Stuck in a Swiss hotel resting up for a race left me with little to watch but MTV dating shows that weren’t dubbed into German. I’m pretty bemused by the whole thing, shows involving going on dates with people’s mums, having a friend use a lie detector on potential dates, speed dating with 4 back-up dates if you’re not happy… Bizarrest of all some reality show involving a rock star auditioning girls to be his girlfriend at the point I saw their parents had been brought along. Just plain strange.

I now have just 9 more working days to go and I am free for a life as a international playboy full time athlete. On the day I leave I will have worked for the same company (under varying names and ownership) for 9 years and 2 months. It’ll be quite a change not to be going in and sitting in the office anymore. I hope my fear of wasting my time will quickly get me up to speed with some structure and plans.

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