Weeks 4 & 5 - foot pain :(

Week 4 was a recovery week, and I guess it sorta felt like recovery. Mostly I recovered from my insane hunger that could not be satiated. I figured going into week 5 I would start to get hungry again but it just hasn't happened. The only thing that has happened, is that I seem to have developed a flair up of plantar fasciitis in my left foot. I think it has something to do with June 19 and 20 where I ran two days in a row. I would say that I pretty much knew after the run on the 20th that Wednesday's run was going to be a little painful. I had to stop and massage/stretch almost every 10-15 minutes. Come Sunday's run, I put a lot of time into foam rolling, massage, and stretch before I went out AND I also put my 'stability wedge' back into my left shoe.

Not only was I feeling the PF, but I also got this weird lump feel in the ball of my foot and toe numbness, which I can only diagnose as Morton's Neuroma. Which is another reason I put the stability wedge back into my shoe. That wedge seems to put the MN on the back burner, and it makes the PF juuuuust noticeable enough that still worry about it, but I am hoping it will heal on it's own while I continue to run. Ibuprofen and ice and comfy shoes everywhere I go until it's healed up. 

I also haven't been going to Friday swim. I am not too sure why, I think it has something to do with Thursday's rest day and it just not being enough rest? I will try to go this week since the following week I am out of town and will have no opportunity to swim unless I swim at the hotel pool or something.

Rest days are a whole other thought since Thursday's tend to be the one day out of the week I just get extremely grumpy and it usually bleeds into Friday until I do my workout. I have to wonder if my body is so used to the endorphins or whatever I get from the workout, and the rest day lets those levels go too low and then I get grumpy. I will have to do some Googlin'!

Week 3

I don't have too much to report on this week, except it's the most voluminous week so far. Which isn't saying too much considering this is only week 3! Sorry for the poor picture quality of the Mon-Sun week. Just 9 hours and 20 minutes of working out and supposedly 4,267 calories!

Saturday was cool. I skipped Friday's optional swim workout for an optional Alamitos Bay swim. I wanted to see how I was doing with swimming distances and also swimming in my wetsuit. The first time I tried it on, it was extremely tight (which gets looser as you fill your suit with water), and my arms would just fatigue like crazy. I read some tips online about where places of the suit get sorta bunched up and where you need to move those bunches in order to free up some shoulder room. I took all the tips and set out to swim for 1 mile in 1 hour, that was my goal. I made 1 mile swim in 35 minutes with four rest breaks! What the crap.. all this swimming is totally paying off. I'm not sure why I'm too surprised about 1 mile being easy since I swim over a mile in master's class, but this time in a wetsuit and open water, YEAH!

Saturday's swim was about the only thing 'cool' about the weekend. Record breaking heat of 100+ temperatures everywhere I worked out. So it was about 96 degs for my 1 hour jaunt saturday afternoon around 4pm, and then it was about 98 degs for my 1:45 bicycle ride with my Dad on sunday. Sunday was Mommie's Day, so after the ride we went out to the coast for dinner and the temperature was much more amenable.

Currently on my Rest Day of week 4, which is a recovery week. I'll be posting about that hopefully on Sunday. :) Preview: Not nearly as hungry as last week.

The three states

It's midweek of Week 3, everything is going pretty well. Today is Friday, so yesterday was a full day of rest, yay! So, what I've noticed is that my body really is only up to feeling/doing three separate things:

Sleeping----HUNGER----Training

Basically when I am awake, I'm always so freaking hungry. I cannot eat enough food to make me stop being hungry, not just regular hungry, I'm STARVING. I eat dinner and then I'm hungry again 2 hours later. I go to sleep hungry, wake up in the middle of the night hungry, wake up hungry. It's almost frustrating. According to my garmin data, I burn about 4000 calories from working out, I am basically negating two full days of eating every week with what I'm doing. Top that with trying to stay relatively gluten free (paleo with rice and dessert :P), I think I need to eat more potatoes!

I'm also very sleepy. Seems like every since last Friday on the drive to Tulare I have not been able to sleep enough to stop being really sleepy during the day. I've had 10 hour nights of sleep, and wake up sleepy! Today doesn't really count because I was out from midnight to 2:15am for work related ventures, so yea.. I'm pretty tired today. But, this is okay because after my bike ride after work, it's time for the Kings hockey game, and each time I sleep through the game, THEY WIN. (Now that I got it down in writing, I'll probably not fall asleep, or they'll lose while I nap) But, yes.. sleepy, and it's only Week 3!

Training is going well. I have not had any issues with just absolute dread of doing a workout, I'm actually enjoying this, though I know a lot of attitude can change in the next 27.5 weeks.

Next week is the real test. I'm on call 24/7 for work AND I'll need to do my training. Glad Week 4 is a recovery week, which cuts back on workouts, but does not eliminate them.

Week 2

Week 2 is in the books and my biggest lesson this week has been to take it easy on the extra curricular (read: social life) :( It kinda sucks to have to say that, but I shuffled my workouts and front-loaded the week so I could drive out to Tulare for some cool explosives training class. It was totally worth it for the class, but I know that it really takes a lot of energy to do what I did.

Notably, moving my 'long' 60 minute run to Wednesday, which included a morning swim, and then waking early on Thursday to fit in a 45 min run. A little too packed of running in a short time, along with a bike on Thursday after going out to dinner with the family, and then waking up early for a Friday swim. That was all capped off with a 3 hour drive to Tulare after 8 hours of work.

Speaking of Thursdays early bike, I am having trouble following the program. The training calls for Zone 1 heart rate training at a 100+ cadence on the bike. Even in the lowest gear of my bicycle, after about 4-6 minutes, my heartrate pops over Zone 1. Zone 1 for me is 121-139 bpm. Either I have really low endurance at high cadence or I have calculated my max heartrate for the bike wrong. I also find it kinda uncomfortable in the saddle when I have to peddle so fast without resistance. I may raise my saddle up a tad and see if that helps.

Thursday bike was also supposed to be 30 minutes long, but doing the math I see I only did 21 minutes. Basically, after 13 mins, TrainerRoad decided to crash at some undetermined time and I needed to stop peddling to get it up and running again. During this time I was also getting really irritated at the evening news because they were covering a huge fire constantly, do you have any idea how boring it is to do an indoor bike ride and just watch fire on TV? About as boring as watching the yule log on KCAL9 every Christmas... except this time you have no music and no presents. Its boring!!

So, crashed indoor trainer program, uncomfortable saddle parts, and annoying TV made me quit early by what I think is more like 5-6 mins short.

WEEK 2 DONE!