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.

The Frozen Four

I'm going to be gone the next few days, in Minnesota for the Frozen Four. I have 2 goals; watch Michigan win the national championship, and come home weighing less than I left.

Work hard, lose weight, win contests

I will probably never be mistaken for a "gym rat". I don't mean that because of my appearance, simply the hours I spend training will probably never have anyone label me as someone who loves to work out. 

Sure, unlike a year ago today, I no longer hate running. I'm still not any good at it, but I don't completely hate it. Because I have a lot of things that I am slightly innately talented in, when I'm not good at something I usually don't put in the effort to get better at it. That's why though I am still quite slow, I'm also fairly proud of the fact that I continue to work on my running. 

Last night, I went to the gym to run; it rained a lot yesterday and there's no point in getting my new running shoes wet just for training. Week 4 of my Couch to 5k has 16 minutes of running in a 30 minute period. Last night, I did 2.5 miles in the 30 minutes. That's about what I have previously been able to do at race pace, but these workouts are include a fair amount of recovery (aka not fast) walking in between runs. My goal is still to be able to run a 30 minute 5k, and I'm making progress.

I followed that run up with a 42 minute swim. I had originally planned to swim for an hour with a goal of breaking 2100 yards inside the hour. Rach let me know before we left the house that she was planning on us swimming this morning, so I backed off last night and only did 1500 yards. I was on pace to be very close to 2100 inside an hour. I did a 300 yd warm up, then did 12x100 with 15 seconds rest each lap. I didn't do any cool downs, because my last couple hundred were plenty slow anyways.

I ate ok yesterday. Not great, but ok. I did a bit of stress eating, and I need to cut that out. Between a tough day at work, and learning Rachelle's brother will likely be in the hospital until at least Wednesday, and may need surgery to repair the problem with his lung, it was a tough day. Not only may Alex need surgery, but even without the surgery, he and Rachelle's dad may not be able to join us for the planned trip to the Frozen Four this weekend, which would really stink. We don't get to see them often enough as it is, and with Rach's dad and I becoming lawbreakers together (we trespassed on train tracks at the women's frozen four to get a good look at some trains), I am hopeful we can get into more mischief this weekend. 

Even with the only average eating, I still lost another pound, which means 5 pounds in a little over a week. My portion control is now to the point where I'm getting hungry between meals again, and needing small snacks to get through the day.

Oh, and the last thing; I won a contest. This will surprise almost no one who is a regular reader. This mornings tweets testify to this fact. First is the Loving the Bike tweet congratulating me, following by Bengi's response:

Name redacted to protect the funny...

So what did I win and how did I win it? Loving the Bike had a contest sponsored by Grease Monkey Wipes. They wanted to see "dirty pictures" of people with their bikes. I've only really been truly dirty on my bike a couple of times, and thankfully I have some good pictures from the Landmine Classic where I took a header and got covered in dirt. Here was my winning entry:

I think they just really liked my smile

People have often asked me how I am so lucky; some of that I can't control, but the one thing I can control is that I make the effort to enter. You can't win if you don't play. In this case I won a canister and a box of Grease Monkey Wipes. Now I don't have to worry about Rach's reaction when she sees me carrying the bike into the bathtub.

I finally had a HEALTHY weekend...

The past few weekends haven't really gone according to plan in terms of being healthy; I did fine with the workouts, but not so hot with the food intake. I was training hard, but it was like I was always playing catch up because of the amount of calories I was taking in. In fact, it was exactly like that. I decided this weekend needed to be different, that I was going to come into monday weighing the same or less than I did on Friday. No more weekend weight gain.

Friday night put a small crimp in my plans, as I had to take Rachelle out for dinner at a French restaurant near our house that I've been promising to take her to forever. This was her official birthday dinner (delayed by almost a week), and while I wasn't perfectly behaved (hello, dessert), I had more vegetables than I did meat or starches.

And that is the only bad food report for the entire weekend. I actually LOST a pound over the weekend.


Here's how good I did; Sunday, I even made a healthy double cheeseburger. 2 turkey patties, low-fat cheese, miracle whip light, and fiber one bread. 12 points, plus a bunch of fiber, so un-officially more like 10. And I didn't even eat the fries Rach baked for me with it. With a small breakfast, and a healthy light lunch, I had points left over at the end of the night and went to bed a little hungry.

The training also was strong this weekend, and with nice weather, I even managed to get in an outdoor bike ride on Saturday. This confirmed my suspicions that while I was somewhat indoor bike fit, my outdoor cycling has a ways to go. It also confirmed my bike is sorely in need of a tune up, with a pretty decent wobble in my front wheel. I purchased a deal on Tippr last week that provides a bike tune-up for $30 that includes everything from truing the wheels to taking apart the drive train and cleaning it. Plus, the company even provides a concierge service to pick up/drop off your bike when they fix it.

Back to the training for a minute; now that I'm using Training Peaks, I can track all of my workouts in a single place. Here's what last weeks workouts looked like in total:

This pie looks good enough to eat...

6 1/2 hours in training time for the week, but it could have been better. I missed one swim workout due to the shortened weekend pool hours at Fitrec, and my runs are usually half of what my training plan says as I am still working through my Couch to 5k plan. I started week 4 on Saturday, and it nearly doubled the amount of time spent running from week 3. Between that and the big dinner on Friday, let's just say this wasn't my fastest run ever, but I get another shot at it tonight.

Notes:

- I finally got a chance to make good on my matching funds pledge for my Team Fight fundraising. Now I feel comfortable again asking people to give towards my goal. 

- Having 50 degree weather 2 days in a row made me feel spoiled. We're back into the rainy 40's this week again, so I'm taking advantage and sending the bike off for service today. I'll use the bike at the gym for my riding workouts during the time it's gone.

April Fools day wasnt all that funny...

I had a great day yesterday, with a nice1 hour ride at the end of the day. Today, has not been so great

 Let's see, I think it happened in this order:

- It snowed last night, and after highs in the 50's this week, the high today was about 35

- The hamster bit me hard enough to draw blood when I fed her this morning

- Work was literally one of the most difficult days I've had in a long time, and I feel like my brain is jello

- Rachelles brother had a medical emergency and had to have emergency surgery. He's doing well now, but it was a weird end to a weird day.

We're going to dinner then hopefully to the gym, and to forget about the rest of this day.