It's good to be back.

Yes, I’m finally human again as opposed to a walking cesspool of disease, mucus and bacteria. 

As hoped, the two weeks we had lying on beaches in Fiji and doing little exercise other than ‘walking to the pool’, 'playing with the kids', ‘lifting cocktails to face’ and 'pressing button for more cocktails' actually did wonders in finally knocking off the remnants of the myriad of illnesses from the past few months. OK, it also replaced some of those illnesses with a small bout of food-related tummy problems, but that’s par for the course for a Fiji holiday and we soon dealt with that.

Returned to work feeling pretty fresh and ready to get things going again – Only to be confronted by a ‘return of the kidney stone’ while at work one day. But after an hour of under-breath cursing and staggering around the office it soon passed and I think heralded the final end to illness.

From that point on it’s been a slow process of gradually picking up the exercise again, without overdoing it… That’s looked a bit like:

• Week 1: Riding to work
• Week 2: Incorporate boxing and circuit (2 nights)
• Week 3: Incorporate jogs and interval sessions (2 lunchtimes)

And now we’re kind of at week 4 I guess…. Where we’ll slowly incorporate some short morning session, mainly focused on strength and weights work.

I’ve also had the opportunity to work with my significant other in some sessions focused on her upcoming Stampede (or as I annoyingly refer to it – “Tough Mudder Lite”). I’m looking forward to attending that as a spectator and seeing other crazies go through it for a change. Hopefully that will give me a little boost just at the right time to kick my training up a notch.

One sick mudder

You'd think things would have to improve after my last post, but let me list the hilarious shenanigans that have made up the month since my last post:

• Viral infection
• Sinus infections
• Pneumonia (mild fortunately)
• Kidney stones (That was a fun way to spend my son's birthday! In the ER in hideous pain)
• Torn intercostal muscles (from coughing too much)
• Asthma 
• Pleurisy

After several weeks of 'making do' and coming into work in a vain attempt to be normal I finally gave up two weeks ago and took a week off sick, followed by a week of working from home....

It's been a hideously slow road, two steps forward and one step back, and today is my first full day back at work (and it's now 4:51 and I'm exhausted!!) 

Needless to say that training has completely gone out the window. I can barely breathe, my chest muscles still hurt when I cough (which is often), and I've lost 6kgs (which is not a good thing for this scrawny runt!)

Luckily I have some annual leave coming out where I can hopefully recover fully and return ready to hit the training hard for the last 4 months before the event...  But at this stage I'm very glad I didn't sign up for Sydney!!!

Pneumonia = Pno training...

It feels like I've never trained in my life.... For the past few weeks things have been a blur and I'm back to feeling like I'm at square 1 again.

It started with a couple of conferences - The first one went ok, with me being able to squeeze in some light evening runs. Then the second I had great intentions to hit the on-site gym.. Got up at 6am all fired up only to find it was locked and I had no way of accessing. Crud. Back to bed and watch crap TV until a heavy bacon and eggs breakfast an hour later. That was productive....

Then the day after I return to work feeling some skin sensitivity, which is a little alarm bell for me that things aren't right. Still - I managed to fit in the lunchtime training (focused on pull-ups. Ouch), and on Friday felt manageable as well. Saturday was worse however and by Sunday all thought of training couldn't have been further from my mind.

What followed was a week of misery, or more accurately viral pneumonia. Not a pleasant way to spend a week and I'm still now, a week later, in the process of recovering. While I'm back up and moving I know I still can't get enough air in my lungs to work out properly, and am having to accept that training will have to wait. 

Here's hoping that this will serve as a suitable physical/emotional/mental break so I can come back and hit it hard when it's all ok again.... At least the weather's crap so that doesn't make me feel so bad about it right now :)

Tough Mudder Melbourne 2013 - new dates!

Registrations for Melbourne/Phillip Island 2013 opened this week, and the most notable thing was the dates have moved from Feburary to the 19th and 20th and January.

The date change hasn't caused any real problem for our team - We've all signed up for the Sunday straight away - But it's certainly going to cause some training issues. Weather won't be much different (with a scary prospect of a 40-degree celsius race day - Yes, that's quite possible here at that time of year!), but the real problem is going to be trying to do that last critical month of training during the Christmas/NY silly season. 

In some ways it might give us more time with the holidays 'n all - But it also means we won't be together as much. Pros and cons.... But certainly something we'll need to take into account.

It also means one less month of training!!! 

Nutrition for tightwads

It's funny how we've slowly started unconsciously training...

It all started with someone feeling like keeping up a weekly jog and heading off, then lamenting how much harder it is alone... So we all joined in.

Then we felt that it'd be good to keep the strength stuff up. So another lunchtime was chosen to be our second workout day with a mix of intervals, sprints, tabata, and such.

Then we invited other staff to join in.... And before you know it we're back into a training regime! 

And then last week we actually commenced the preparations for Tough Mudder Melbourne 2013, starting with the recruitment of new victims colleagues, and encouraging them to make sure they're doing 3 sessions a week of something or other for the next few months (and then we'll ramp up the severity about 3-4 months out)

Personally it's all been coming together pretty well too. On top of that above routine of weekly jogs and weekly strength stuff I've also got 3-4 days of riding to work, one session of boxing after work, and then 3 mornings of brief crossfit stuff (which has been the hardest element to keep up, given my limited equipment and hatred of mornings). But most of the time I've been at it pretty reasonably...

But something funny often happens to me once I finally 'get into' a routine. After a couple of weeks I get sick. Nothing severe, just something that makes me feel blech and awful. And sure enough - yesterday it hit me. Straight after boxing and the ride home there was this dramatic decline until I was in bed huddled up and planning my day of sick leave for Thursday.

Fortunately this has happened enough times to know what's going on - It's when I'm not paying attention to my nutrition.

 I've got a few things working against me when it comes to appropriate and sufficient nutrition during training:

1. I'm a tightwad - So I'm loathe to spend money on exorbitant lunches or protein powders. All those recipes for power smoothies sound great, but that macrobiotic yoghurt, fresh blueberries, flaxseed oil and why protein isolate powder adds up! And I'm loathe to spend that much....
2. I'm largely vegetarian - While not strictly vegetarian, for a combination of tightwad and ethical reasons I generally try and avoid meat. So the regime of endless grilled chicken breasts as a nutritional plan ain't really going to work for me. 
3. I'm lazy - So anything that's too onerous or complicated or time-consuming isn't practical either.

One thing I've been particularly bad in ignoring is the need to consume enough calories and protein within that hour-space after exercise, and that's something I'm keen to remiss. It does make me wonder how much better my improvements could have been if I'd paid more attention of the last year or so.

So, some new goals for me:

1. Eat more, overall.
2. Ensure I eat an hour after every exercise session. That might be as complex as a smoothie after my morning routines, or just a peanut-butter sandwich and a glass of milk after lunchtime sessions.
3. Do it without too much $$$ or resorting to fancy powders and bars.

One thing I have in my favour is that as a skinny runt, I'm not worried about just picking protein above carbs and fats. So things like whole milk and whole eggs are still on the table as far as I'm concerned.  But it will be something to watch...

And to help me track my progress, ideas, and recipes even as I stumble across them, I'll tag this appropriately :)

 

So what now?

It's been exactly a month since the Tough Mudder in Melbourne/Phillip Island, and where am I and our team at now?

Well, after boring our work colleagues and families silly for a week we all accepted that we had to get back to normal life, at least in some sense. We played with the idea of heading up to Sydney to do the TM there, but decided we'd think about that for a month - and now with the month up I doubt any of us will be doing it. Not that we don't want to, but the time/$ is a bit of a barrier (and some of our families seem to want us back from the world of training!)

But it's also been interested after a month to see the training sneaking back in, even without a purpose, so attached to it have we become. A few of us went out on our own on occasion but it just didn't really gel or feel the same. So very subtly a Thursday lunchtime session emerged, which was then advertised to the rest of the office and we were delightfully surprised to see 8 people (most of whom hadn't done the TM) turn up to engage in 30-40 minutes of interval work of some form. So that'll keep going.

And then today 4/5 of the old team decided we felt like going for a jog - so we went off for the old workplace 4.5km run. I hadn't run since the TM so I was quite worried about my performance but was pleased to see that most of the fitness is still there. One of the girls on the team (ironically the oldest!) has already decided her next challenge is a marathon (!!!!) but the rest of us aren't quite nuts enough to join her in that at this stage....

And for me personally? Well, with an understanding of my weaknesses I'm keeping up with the weekly boxing class (although I've dropped the circuit for now to save some time/money), I'm riding more (again, as much to save money as for fitness!), and have started a plan of doing some crossfit based workouts 3 mornings a week - They seem to be going quite well so far. Short, sharp and something that keeps you interested, as well as building the strength I need. I'm still limited by my equipment somewhat (desperately need a barbell!) but it's going well.

Now the big question for us is "What next?" Sure, there's the Tough Mudder in 2013 but I'm feeling the need to mix that up with something else, something different..... Now just to search to see what else is out there...