Swimming like a fish?

Well, so far October has pretty much gone to plan, for the first week I swam every day, Monday - Friday, for a total of 6000m, which is well and truly the most swimming I've done in a week to date. It's also the fastest swimming I've done so far. Which can only be a good thing. 

Diet wise, From Monday to Monday I went from 101.2 - 100.1kg, so a drop of 1.1kg. Which is a good start to the program I think. I admit that I didn't count calories during the weekend. Which is not ideal, but the days I did count (tues - fri) I ranged from 1671 - 1955 Cal so I am happy with that too. 

I'm undecided about my leg at the moment, I'm thinking about starting back on the bike this week, but seem to be constantly changing my mind... So at this stage I'm not sure if I'll re-start biking this week, I am hopeful tho

New Month = Fresh Start

So after a disaster of a September, what should I do to try and redeem myself in October?

Well the first and most important goal is to get injury free. That’s not something that I can tangibly measure, or record so is a bit of a difficult one to go about achieving. But it is by far the most important ‘athletic goal’ I can achieve at the moment.

To help achieve becoming injury free, I will not be setting any biking/running goals for the month. Everything going to plan I will be able to ride again in a week or so, and hopefully running before the end of the month, but I will be easing into it, in small amounts so no time/distance targets will be set this month.

The one target I will set is swimming, which I should be able to do without further damaging my calf. The goal here is 20km for the month. This would be the most swimming that I have ever done in a month, but when the fact I’m on limited biking/running is not a huge amount of exercise. So I think will be an achievable goal.

The other big goal is weight. As I said a few days ago, September was a disaster. I gained back 5kg that I had worked hard to lose. Today I weighed 101.2kg, and I am going to set a target of being under 98kg by the end of October.

To get there I will be measuring/weighing and counting calories again. My target is 1900 – 2000 Cal/day for the next 4 weeks. (I am going to allow myself 4 ‘cheat meal’ days where I am allowed to be over the target)

So in list form:

1.   Get injury free
2.   Swim 20km
3.  Weigh < 98kg
4.  Eat 1900-2000 Cal/Day 

That should do it as far as goals go for this month. Everything going to plan (which it has yet to do) I’ll be nice and healthy and swimming like a fish in no time

September

Septembers training log below. The positive is the swimming, the negatives are obviously the weeks off at the beginning and end of the month:

Complete and Utter Failure

The title of this post pretty much sums up the month of September. There is still a day and a half to go in the month, but its safe to say that I've failed to meet all of my goals.

The main reason for this is that my leg hasn't healed as well as I was hoping it too. Some over enthusiastic bike riding caused some of the pain to come back after it had seemed to be healing well. This in turn resulted in having a 2nd week of no exercise at all, and the decision to go 2-3 weeks with no biking either. So time goals for the month were blown out of the water.

My 2nd big problem was that I replaced workouts with a good dose of emotional eating. I've been back at Wendys... The big reduction in exercise combined with the big increase in crappy food has resulted in my weight skyrocketing. In the last 4 weeks I have put back on what it took 7 to lose. I'm about 101 at last weigh in.

There are no excuses, it was all me. So we start again. Weight loss is going to be the big focus for October. Early next week I'll be posting some new goals, but safe to say they'll be more focused on healthy eating and getting injury free this time.

The one positive is that I have made it back to the pool finally. And amazingly I've been swimming better than before. So that's something to be pleased about.

September Update

So far the month’s been going ok. I had complete rest for the first 7 days, and since then have been fairly consistent in my training. The big good point is that I’ve started swimming again, and everything going to plan that’ll be a permanent change. The big bad point is that I can still feel a twinge in my calf. So I am becoming increasingly worried that I’m not going to be back to full fitness in time for my summer races. But what will be, will be. There’s no point worrying about that now, all I can do is the best with what I’ve got. 

What to do when injured?

Following on from the last few months here are some goals for September. The rules are I'm not allowed to do any running, or any hard biking (so hills are out). So for the month I want to:

1. Weigh less than 96kg by the end of the month.
2. Have 20 hours of low effort cycling.
3. Swimming. Must get back to the pool.
4. Have a total of 25 hours swim/bike for the month.

Hopefully that will be enough to keep me in some sort of shape and not let my injury kill the HIM dream.

Not a good end of the month

Well, I've alluded to it in previous posts this month. For the last 4 weeks or so, I've been running injured. Yesterday I went to the doctor, finally, and he confirmed what I already knew. I'm buggered, and need some time off to recover. Specifically he thinks that I've torn the webbing which holds the gastrocnemius and soleus muscles together in my calf, and I need about 4 weeks of no running or hard cycling.

So this is going to cause a bit of a problem for my HIM training. It means that I'll only have 8-9 weeks of running before race day. Which is not even close to ideal. So I'm going to have to re assess things over the next few weeks.

Looking back at August I had 4 goals I wanted to achieve with my training:

1: Start swimming. Total failure. Never made it to the pool
2: Run 100km for the month. A close failure. Ran 95, but considering I was injured I should have backed off and done much less.
3: Bike 10 hours, target 14. Big pass. 15 hours on the bike, for 358km. My biggest bike riding month to date. Included back to back 100km+ weeks.
4: Weigh under 98kg. Pass. On 1 Sept. I weighed in at 96.9 and it has been over a week since I was more than 98kg.

So that's a score of 2/4. Which is what I said I would be happy with... so I am.

And lastly, August's training log: