From Tough Mudder to Muditation

After a bit of a hiatus here, I've moved my blogging activities over to the aptly titled Muditation, where I'm trying to bring together some different parts of my life, rather than scattering them across several web presences.

So no more updates here, but the OCR and fitness stuff will continue over there, mixed in with some other stuff.

The family that trains together stays together...

Family tabata burpees :)  What else does one do on Boxing Day?

One month to go! Again!

Where has the time gone?  I still feel mentally like I’ve got months to prepare when in reality it’s 4 short weeks (confusticated by the shenanigans that is Christmas and New Year) before the training stops and Tough Mudder is on us once again…

The lack of posting in the last few months however doesn’t indicate lack of effort. The training program which I put together has been roughly adhered to, with maybe a 75% success rate. Not bad I think. It has been hard to put the same level of zeal and enthusiasm into it this time round – Partially because we don’t have the unknown fear factor to drive us, but also because we know that our fitness level is higher, and we made do with what we had quite well last year. So simply maintaining that is sufficient…

Our team is now up to a nice 5 – 3 girls, 2 guys. We haven’t all had a chance to train as one big bunch, but we’ve met each other at various opportunities, so that should be fine. It will definitely be a different experience from the first Tough Mudder, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

Fitness-wise I think I’m also slightly better prepared. I’ve worked pretty consistently on upper body strength – however when I ventured into the school playground the other week and took a shot at the monkey bars I failed just as dismally as before! Bum. Still more work to do there, but I think much of the issue is about the inflexbility/pain in my shoulders when I try to swing. So I’m working on that by just hanging and swinging at home. I also discovered that taking the monkey bars sideways seemed a bit easier, so that might end up being my approach on the day.  As for everything else, well we’ll just see how that unfolds on the day. And Everest is really as much about who’s at the top as what I can bring, so we’ll see. I’ve learnt some handy parkour techniques which might help though…

I’ll also be running without a support team this year as my wife will be overseas at the time – Not a huge deal as I know what to expect and can work with that, but it’s always nice having someone on the sidelines looking proud of you ;) 

Giving in to the dark side (of protein supplements)

Look what arrived today. 10 ridiculous kgs of protein powder… Just looking at it almost makes me want to laugh!

We’ve resisted and fought against this day for a long time. I’ve never been one to believe too much in the hype surrounding supplements and such, believing that the best approach (and all that was necessary in fact) was to eat sufficiently and eat well with ‘normal’ foods. And that’s pretty much all I did for last year’s training, and even with the ridiculous amount of exercise that I was doing towards the end (cycling, running, weights, intervals, etc) I didn’t resort to anything ‘unnatural’. In fact, I didn’t pay much attention to my diet much at all (besides being generous with what I ate normally).

However, a few things have made me question whether there wasn’t something missing in that – First has been my tendency to get quite ill if I’m not paying attention to my diet. This has happened numerous times before and it’s made me consider that perhaps my ‘normal’ diet is lacking, especially in protein. I have also wondered perhaps ‘what if’ in terms of training for the last Tough Mudder, and that if I had paid more attention to my protein intake perhaps my strength and performance might have been better by the time I got there… Which leads me to #2: That we live a largely vegetarian diet, or at least one which minimises the amount of meat we consume. So the concept of sitting down to a chicken breast or steak at dinner is pretty uncommon for us. (This is combined with the fact that protein tends to either be expensive, time-consuming to prepare, or something our kids won’t eat (lentils, soy, etc).  Carbs we have no problem consuming, but protein less so. Thirdly is an issue of timing – Much of my training seems to be at awkward points in the day, so our trainer’s post-workout encouragement to ‘take some protein within an hour’ is hard to manage when I then have to hop on the bike and spend the next hour riding home. As much as I’d like to have a bacon sandwich before cycling (who wouldn’t!?), it just isn’t practical. Whereas a protein-supplement of some form is a lot easier to manage in those narrow windows of opportunity when it’s not a ‘meal time’ per se.

Still, even with all of those reasons I resisted it. It felt unnecessary, expensive, and unnatural.

However, then my wife returned home after a session with her trainer saying that he’d encouraged her to take some form of supplement. I’m not entirely sure why – Partly it’s the low-carb, high-protein diet he wants her to follow (her goals are somewhat different to mine), but perhaps she was also aware that she might not be consuming enough protein for the same reasons as me, and we weren’t about to start eating meat every night of the week. And then when we sat down and did the sums, we realised that the protein powders (bought at a sensible price) were actually cheaper than many other options. About 80 cents a serving with this lot, which is probably better bang for buck (in protein terms at least) than regular peanut butter sandwiches, boiled eggs or tins of tuna, not to mention more convenient.

And now with two of us in the same boat, we decided to bite the bullet and go for it. I still can’t call myself a ‘believer’ in this stuff (and I’m still appalled by the level of obsessiveness which goes on around supplements – It gives wine-snobs a run for their money!) but I’ll be curious to see how it helps in terms of recovery and improvements in muscle strength. I’ll still be limiting myself to no more than one serve a day, and making sure that the bulk of my protein comes in ‘food’ form, along with lots of carbs and other good stuff, but it will be interesting to see.

A quick tally of today’s food intake gives me only about 60g or so, when I should be on about 100… So I feel a bit more comfortable that we truly are taking protein as a ‘supplement’ (Ie. “making up for a deficiency in your diet”) rather than as pointless ‘extra’, in the assumption that more protein = more muscle. And we'll see how we feel about this stuff once the 10kgs is gone - Which may take a while!!!

Training Plan for 2012/13 - This time it's personal.

Over the past few weeks I've slowly been ramping up the training, and this week the morning sessions have kicked in. Geez how I hate them. Getting up at 6am has never been my strength, and to do so just so I can fit in some painful pullups and thrusters isn't exactly the sort of inspiration your mind needs at that time. But still, it's gotta happen...

Part of what I'm hoping will help will be a good training plan. I learned a lot from last year about the balance between doing all I can and overdoing it, as well as refining it in terms of what sort of exercises I do when, to help balance it out and focus on my weaknesses.

So, this is what I'm proposing for the 'intense' training period which I think I'm about to enter (with 4 months to go)

• Cycling - 3-4 days a week, 30+km each time. This is my work commute so I usually don't push too hard, but I'll be making sure to include some solid sprinting work up some choice hills.
• Circuit/Boxing - Mon/Wed evenings respectively. These are the sessions after work with the trainer, so they're good solid cardio and muscular endurance sessions. Intensity varies, but good regular sessions.
• Strength morning sessions - I've realised that a lot of my work last year was more 'muscular endurance' than 'strength', and that's what let me down - especially in the upper body. So Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning will be 30 minutes of focused strength work. Think pull-ups, shoulder press, bench press... you get the idea. Few reps, heavy work.
• Lunchtime sessions - Monday and Wednesday will be jogs (including some upper body work), Tuesday and Thursday will be more interval work. 
• Jogs - Weekends we'll fit in some decent jogs, including some off-road group jogs as time and commitments allow...

 Of course, planning is the easiest/funnest bit. Doing will be trickier...

A testing recovery

After all of the increasing activity mentioned in the last post, I had a chance to actually test whether this was paying off on the weekend – With a 6 hour charity ride around Calder Park Raceway.

The TdH team - I'm the lanky pale one...

I’d actually signed up for this ride (run by Epilepsy Victoria as a bit of a fundraiser & awareness raiser) back in my pre-plague days, and had pretty much written it off as I’d done way too little training for it. But, I was encouraged to reframe it and treat is a bit of training itself – And so I rocked up on Sunday morning, my chunky aluminium commuter looking decidedly out of place amongst the carbon fibre speed machines – and gave it a go.

Actually, it surprised me. The event was nowhere near as hardcore as I feared, and I found myself riding alongside all myriad of riders, as well as being passed by and passing others. Families, young focused kids (who were scarily fast!), teenage girls, and the usual crowd of middle aged lycra. And with that inspiration I was able to knock over about 120km in just under the 6 hours…. I was pretty pleased with that, as I broke my previous personal best (a measly 75km) and the 100km mark. And I even managed to fit in a mid-ride massage (thank heavens for the massage college which had showed up to give free massages!) and a few breaks to rest my burning quads. (The top guy did well over 200km and never got off the bike.... Nutso... but respect)

And even more surprisingly, I’m not that sore now. I expected to be in agony but those massages must have helped and (I hope) my fitness is returning enough to recover quicker. I even managed to show up for circuit training Monday evening (cursed high interval sprints and 23km deadballs….), rode in this morning and jogged today. Woohoo….

Ahh, finished at last.

But most surprisingly, I enjoyed riding in circles for 6 hours.... Never thought I'd see that!