Monday, April 11, 2011

0 for 3

There's a famous sports quote that goes "Second place is just the first loser". When you're actually in a position to win, as opposed to just being happy to be a competitor as I usually am; it's very much the right way to look at things. That's why seeing Michigan lose in the National Championship on Saturday felt like such a kick in the gut. After a sterling performance on Thursday, they just couldnt pull out the win on Saturday, even after taking the game to overtime. For both Rach and I, it was a reminder of the heartache of 3 weeks ago when her team lost in the women's national championship game.

Having a favorite team make it to both Men's and Women's national championship hockey games is great, but going 0 for 2 in those games wasn't the most fun thing ever to be sure.

My other goal for the weekend was to lose weight while I was gone. That was the 3rd strike, so to speak. But I do feel like there was some kind of moral victory there as well as I didn't gain any weight either. I weighed this morning before breakfast what I weighed on Friday before breakfast. It does mean I lost another 3 days of weight loss time before the NE Season Opener which is now just less than a week away.

I was pretty careful about my food choices for the most part; I only ate fried food for 2 meals, and I had vegetables at every meal except breakfast, during which I had fruit. I had dessert only once, and I had regular soda only once. Not perfect, but so much better than I've been during previous vacations. I made conscious choices at every meal to be careful of portion size and content.

I also managed to get workouts in on Friday and Sunday. 30 minute high intensity rides matched to a set fat-burning heart rate. Cadence never fell below 86 and maxed out at 106. I also swam twice on friday, though the second time was little more than goofing off. I didn't run this weekend; but we walked a lot! Several trips around all 3 floors of the Mall of America made me wish I had a pedometer  to track my mileage. My feet were pretty sore still on Saturday morning and I only had my worn out shoes so I figured better to skip a run than potentially cause an injury. I'm doubling up on workouts with a run and a swim on my normal rest day (Monday) to get that extra time back.

I'm really getting excited that we now have just a month left until race season starts.

4 comments:

  1. Meals: Quick question. Are you watching the types of foods? Specifically the less refined/processed foods? Carrie and I did a 2-week no "added sugar" foods. Basically dropping sweets and anything that had __any__ form of dextrin or glucose within its first five ingredients. That helped us drop not only bad foods, but pay more attention to the types of foods we've been eating.
    We're more organic now, and much less processed foods. Carrie has dropped quite a bit of weight and I've lost a few and been able to maintain quite easily.
    Just a thought. Checkout dustinmaherfitness.com -- granted its a "mommy" bootcamp, but Carrie has done some guest blogging for him and talks quite alot about what we've been doing at home.

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  2. Ryan,

    I mostly avoid sugar as a part of my regular diet. I eat the very occasional low-fat frozen yogurt, and some occasional small bits of dark chocolate. I'm not 100% about avoiding it because my wife is a chocolate addict so I occasional have a little. But they're very rare treats.

    The only sugars I really intake is in a once a week (or less) regular soda (when a diet I can tolerate is not available), or as part of the foods we use for training/recovery. Because sugar is the first thing you burn off, and you need it for endurance, many of the competition/recovery foods have a decent amount of sugar. I try to stay with the natural ones, but with some of the bars I like, its not always possible.

    Thanks for the link; I've read it a couple times in the past but I'll make sure to catch up this week.

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  3. Talk about heartbreak and the disallowed goal that went in before the whistle blew, they replayed it a 100xs on tv, puck was in before the ref blew the whistle, at least you didnt have to listen to Barry Melrose for 3 hours, what a putz with a mullet.

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  4. Yeah, the disallowed goal was hard for us from our vantage point on the other end of the rink. It sure looked like it went in. Im not surprised it got waived off though considering the goal review that got them into the tournament. If they could have gotten the puck out of the zone in OT, I think theyd have won. They just couldnt get that line off the ice.

    Good luck to your wings in the playoffs, my CBJ are looking at another high draft pick tonight.

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