Showing posts with label Beer. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Beer. Show all posts

Tuesday, 24 January 2012

Success: Consistency be thy name, sleep be thy ally

All of the what can only loosely be described as training I have done over the last couple of years follows a very similar pattern.

Have a big night out; resolve that that's enough for now and I really should buckle down; start well, get a good few days in, maybe as much as two weeks; feel amazing, stronger and fitter every day!;10 to 20 days later growing euphoria erupts and one night (usually after a heavy weights session, there's a definite pattern) have a massive night out. The following day I miss whatever I had planned, maybe miss the day after too, probably go out again, and before I know it there's been a week of nothing - or at least very little.

Two great weeks on, one damaging week off. Rinse, and repeat.

Despite this, I have got a bit fitter, a bit faster, and even a little bit lighter. This cycle has delivered marginal gains. However, this year I want to get Much Fitter, Much Faster, and Much(cross out) Quite A Bit Lighter. Everything I have read, and everyone I've spoken to has said the same thing - the only way to start getting anywhere near uncovering what you're genuinely capable of is to train well. Training well means you need to:

  1. Follow some kind of plan
  2. Rest and recover appropriately
  3. Train consistently

At the end of of this week I will, for I think the first time in my life, have completed 4 planned weeks of training comprising one complete rest day per week, and one or more scheduled activities every other day.

Everything is logged, all the numbers add up, I'm feeling great. But I'm starting to get tired. This morning, getting out of bed was tough, and I mean tough. On only a couple of days in the last 23 have I got 8 hours of sleep, more normal has been 7.5 or 7. This is usually absolutely fine, I have never been a "needs 8 hours or cuts everyone's head off until he's had a few coffees" kinda guy, however with the increased and consistent higher training load I think it's starting to catch up on me. I think Mrs (who has a record of being better at maintaining a consistent training load) has been right all along.

We need to get more sleep.

Saturday, 31 December 2011

That's it, I quit!

I try not to quit things. I've never been one for giving up. Well, it's about time I changed that.

My biggest barrier to success next year is my weight. I'm not a particularly fat bloke, this morning I was 86.7kg (which is in the healthy BMI range if you're comfortably over 6' like I am). I've been a lot more - I was around 100kg a couple of years ago when I first started caring about these things.

Anyway, the biggest barrier to performance is weight. I plotted my parkrun times against the weight I was on that day. I was absolutely shocked at the direct correlation.



The exception is the last couple of weeks - the spike in weight was a result of going on holiday and coming back 4kg heavier 10 days later!. Ignoring that bit, it's blindingly obvious:

The lighter I am the faster I am.

The biggest (certainly my biggest) barrier to reaching my race weight (whatever that turns out to be!) is alcohol. However, it's not just the alcohol, it's everything that comes with it.

You consume absolutely bucket loads of empty (useless) carbs during a night on the lash. The sleep you get afterwards is poor quality so you wake up tired, and it's not restorative so you don't benefit from the exercise you got that day so much. The next day you're knackered and more likely to crave yet more junk carbs.

I really enjoy a night on the town on days where I've had fantastic training sessions (full to the brim with happy-happy endorphins) and that's absolutely the worst way to "recover" from a good session, undoing all the good work and then some and not giving your body the fuel and nutrition it craves to rebuild after the damage of exercise. As if that wasn't bad enough, I'm less likely to complete the sessions I had scheduled for the next day (and if I do make it, it will be a junk session due to me being knackered and weak).

I'm incapable of doing things by halves, so "no more than two pints" or "just once per week" will never work, I know myself too well to kid myself that such initiatives will ever succeed.

So, just this once, and about just this thing, I'm saying:

I quit!

No more alcohol until after IM Wales.