It came around a bit quickly

It's time for Blenheim sprint triathlon again.  My god that came around quickly, but my god so much has happened since last year.

I've become an Ironman, smashed my collar-bone, been made redundant, fundamentally changed my diet, run my first Ultra Marathon, started a new job, struggled with time prioritisation and motivation... and yet I'm here again, 24 hours before Blenheim, and it's going to be great!

 Having remembered the zoomy bit through the forest and the gently undulating bike course a little with rose-tinted glasses, I thought I might race tomorrow on my TT bike.  Then I remembered A. the more than a couple of tight, narrow bends; and B. the high volume of "fun", slower and new-to-the-sport athletes you get a Blenheim.  With my less than perfect handling skills, there'd be no point being on a TT bike as I'd be up on the hoods 95% of the time to cover the brakes.  So... the Jets go onto my lovely, tried-and-trusted Fuji Team Pro Special Edition road bike (2010) and some clip-on tri-bars in case I get to have some fun through the woods.

And the wheels sound -yummy- :o)

I'm heavier and less endurance fit than this time last year and in some ways a lot less stressed than I was on the day of Blenheim last year (I was on a conference call for a critical incident at work for 4 hours and right up until I'd finished racking my bike etc. and then back on it again 15 minutes after I'd finished. The preceding weeks and months at work had not been fun at all.)  But my running has come a long way in terms of technical skills and I'm oddly a lot more comfortable on the bike at the moment, even after months off it and the comfort has happened only in the last 3 weeks really.  That said, with the Jets on the Fuji it's really quite... fiesty compared with having the Mavics on.  Who'da thunk it that wheels made such a difference on a pretty average road bike?



I'm in two minds about how tomorrow might pan out.  The swim isn't going to be spectacular as I'm, sure the lake is hellishly cold and I can't say I've spent a huge amount of time in the pool in the last 10 months so I'm not expecting a stellar performance there.  My transition skills are somewhat rusty, but hey all I have to do is rip off a wet-suit, pop on bike shoes, race belt, helmet and glasses in T1; swap bike shoes for trainers, take off helmet and turn around race belt in T2... how hard can that be?  The bike will be fun as I'm sure the course profile will come flooding back once I'm on it and with 3 laps the 2nd and 3rd will be faster through familiarity.  And the run is all about starting off high cadence and wanting to do well.  I know I can hurt a lot more than I used to be able to and I know that I can push a lot harder than I have in the past, but the important thing is to want to.  If I want to do well, I can push oh so hard and hurt quite a lot.  The thing is, it's UK 70.3 next weekend and I don't want to crash or break myself in some way this close to that.  So it's risk management on the bike and then mash it on the run.

See you on the other side!

I've been *busy*

I got a new job.

I have a theory that there is a finite amount of "eff"; as-in a unit of mental capacity to cope with the various aspects of life.  And when one (or more) aspect gets a bit more attention-seeky, the others get a bit less.

With newjob taking up quite a bit of eff, there's a lot less left for looking after myself as well as I have done in the past.  So, I've been making poor nutrition choices, having difficulty with being away from home a minimum of two nights a week, and training is more difficult than usual due to travel and lack of eff left to plan around it.

So, 4kg heavier than I was 4 weeks ago, and a bit ill (sneezy sneezy sneezy), I've not been keeping up with training as much as I'd like either.  But I have been doing -some-; like getting out up onto the common after the overnight rain...

Pretty unavoidable mud

Camber precludes running on the more solid-looking bit

Running along the flowing water is the best idea - less muddy, better grip on the clean gravel

Trainers in the washing machine, socks in the bin (they were white...)

 I really enjoy running up on the common when it's like this :o)  My socks are ruined though.  Again.

Three days of getting a grip on nutrition, two on training.  It's going a bit better so far, but we'll see what a trip to the US next week brings.  Planning and preparation suggests it could work OK.

Weight Loss: why bother?

Why should I actually bother? 

  
I have a theory.  Losing weight is like stopping smoking.  For some people it's easy; for some people it depends where they are with their life and whether they're "ready" to do it or not; and for some it's never going to happen no matter how much stress and pain they put themselves through.

For the last group, the answer to the question "why should I bother"? is probably "actually, you probably shouldn't".  Even with the right support, education etc. for some people the stress and effort involved for them to lose weight and keep it off is probably more damaging to their quality and length of life than the excess weight could potentially be (excepting the obese to the point of needing a crane to get out of bed).  The stress and frustration alone can be so psychologically and physiologically damaging that it's better to keep that little bit of excess.  There have been recent studies that have correlation between slightly extended life expectancy in the elderly and being slightly overweight compared with the current recommended guidelines.  Of course this could be related to having extra padding around joints, bones and organs so that bumps, knocks and falls have less serious consequences, but without having read the studies in any detail, I couldn't say.

MISERABLE!

There is a great importance, in Western Society mostly, placed on being slim; probably overly slim at that.  Yes, there is a growing percentage of the population who are overweight and yes, there is fat discrimination (which I certainly experienced, first-hand, in the past).  And yes, the pressure to be slimmer can be overwhelming and pretty much dangerous in some cases.  But the dangers of being a bit overweight are surely outweighed by the long term misery, stress and daily difficulties around food and eating?  I, for one, had it pretty easy losing weight (keeping it off was harder, yeah, until I came across a relatively old idea that's re-surfacing) but I'm sure that if it had been a lot harder, I'd've been psychologically better off staying quite fat and probably better off physiologically too.  Stress does bad things to your body as well as your brain and, in fact, can contribute to higher fat gains for the same calorific intake and expenditure compared with an unstressed person.  I was lucky.  I was one one of those people who was "ready" to lose weight and in a position to spend the time and effort controlling intake and learning about food, nutrition and fuelling my body "properly".

For that last group of people... they're probably much better off staying as they are.  Maybe not 100% happy, but happier than they would be struggling, succeeding, failing, getting even bigger, struggling and stressing again, succeeding, and being unhappy with the constant battle.

However, towards the end of 2012, I came across a better way to do all of this.  A lower stress way that involves only a little will power/determination at the start and then there's little to no tears and tantrums around feeling hungry, having cravings (apart from very strong mental states with causes unrelated to nutrition).  If you've been following my posts regularly, you'll already know some bits about it, but for those who haven't, I'll be putting together a more structured permanent page about it in the coming weeks.  (If you can't wait that long, go and read Gary Taubes' "Why We Get Fat and what to do about it"., "Good Calories, Bad Calories", "The Diet Delusion", or if you're comfortable with biology and biochemistry, "The Art and Science of Low Carbohydrate Living.)

I knew it'd be difficult

This "not drinking" thing.  I knew it'd be difficult (but at the same time, easy, when I'm doing it), but I didn't realise how hard it would be before it started.  13 days to go before the cessation of alcohol and I'm finding myself sabotaging normal days because of it now.  Because I'm not going to be doing it fairly soon, I make excuses do to it way more than normal now.  Normally I'd have a drink 1-2 days a week.  This week, so far, it's been 3 days and I find myself thinking about it quite a lot.

Partly, I'm thinking to go down the route of least stress, i.e. stop worrying about it, go with the flow.  Stress is worse (to me) than "bad" nutrition - mostly because we eat a hugely abnormal proportion of unprocessed food compared with most of the population (almost none, in practical terms) - I'm less worried about nutrition than I might be.  Partly, I'm getting wound up by what the scales say - which I need to get a grip on mentally as I've been ill and not exercising and eating odd amounts of food and being in varying states of hydration so it's not a useful measure at the moment.

13 days isn't all that long, so maybe the easiest thing is to take each day one at a time and accept what the scales say.  Then when the new year comes, be happy in the fact that life is easier, schedules are easier to follow, nutrition is easier to deal with...

What a WEEK!

This last week, in fact this last fortnight has been seriously busy and difficult at work so I've had no time to do much more than sleep, commute, work, commute, cook, eat, sleep.  Writing here, social media and human interactions have fallen utterly by the wayside.  Quality time with kitties and Mr TOTKat has dropped well below the levels I'm happy with, but we went out to a gig at Koko last night and spent the whole time lounging on a sofa in the lounge bar, listening to the music and watching the stage via a screen in the lounge.  That was sooooo nice.

The lack of time outside of work-related activity has been frustrating and left me with little energy or enthusiasm to cook and prepare meals.  So, aside from a planned meal out on Tuesday, I've ended up buying lunch twice this week and we had fish and chips on Thursday night so I'm feeling pretty down about my diet.  If I stand back and look at the grand scheme of things, I'm still in a much much better place than a large proportion of the population in terms of minimising consumption of hugely processed food that's prepared by someone else/in a factory (even my fish and chips is made from scratch in the shop, the two lunches were Pho soups from EAT, who are relatively "good"and the meal out was Pizza Express which although it was pizza, again the ingredients aren't too bad compared with, say, a frozen pizza from Iceland).

I have managed to cycle to work and back twice, been to the gym twice so far and run home the last 6.2km of the journey on one day; with a planned gym session tomorrow and perhaps a run later today.  That's pretty good on the exercise front, so at least that's fared well even if I've ended up with 4 out of 40 meals (and I'm calling all of the times I eat during the day a meal as they roughly work out as a sort-of even spread of kcals throughout the day) not made by me.  Cor!  Er.  Now I look at it, that's only 10% of the number of meals (though it's 24% of the total kcals of the week, which is not ideal but still not terrible when my aim is 80:20 clean:dirty).  I am usually so much better than that, which is I guess why I'm so horrified at what's happened this week.  I don't mean in a supercilious or holier-than-thou way, I have just always been pretty keen on making stuff from scratch even before I got healthier; it's how I was brought up - food just doesn't come in packets or cardboard boxes and jars of ready-made stuff.  I've never understood the likes of Findus Crispy Pancakes or the kind of stuff you get from Iceland - that's not food!

Am I being unfair on Iceland here?  I know I have a similar opinion on Aldi, Kwik Save, Lidl etc. but that's probably because I've never set foot in one of those and all I know of them is the adverts on television for packaged, factory made, hugely processed foods made with low-quality ingredients and flogged off for ridiculously low prices.  Is it an unfair judgement on these shops?  Am I just being a food snob?

Gonna be difficult!

Ohboy is it tricky so far.  Only 5 days into the not-logging thing and although I know full well that I'm not eating excessively, because my weight is trickling upwards a tiny bit, I'm stressing about it.  I know I have to give it a couple of weeks or so to settle down, but it's difficult!

I have to remember that changing too many things in a short period of time gives un-interpretable results. But... gnnnngh!

Losing weight: why should I actually bother?

I have a theory. Losing weight is like stopping smoking. For some people it's easy; for some people it depends where they are with their life and whether they're "ready" to do it or not; and for some it's never going to happen no matter how much stress and pain they put themselves through.


For the last group, the answer to the question "why should I bother?" is probably "actually, you probably shouldn't". Even with the right support, education etc. for some people the stress and effort involved for them to lose weight and keep it off is probably more damaging to their quality and length of life than the excess weight could potentially be (excepting the obese to the point of needing a crane to get out of bed). The stress and frustration alone can be so psychologically and physiologically damaging that it's better to keep that little bit of excess. There have been recent studies that have correlation between slightly extended life expectancy in the elderly and being slightly overweight compared with the current recommended guidelines. Of course this could be related to having extra padding around joints, bones and organs so that bumps, knocks and falls have less serious consequences, but without having read the studies in any detail, I couldn't say.


There is a great importance, in Western Society mostly, placed on being slim; probably overly slim at that. Yes, there is a growing percentage of the population who are overweight and yes, there is fat discrimination (which I certainly experienced, first-hand, in the past). And yes, the pressure to be slimmer can be overwhelming and pretty much dangerous in some cases. But the dangers of being a bit overweight are surely outweighed by the long term misery, stress and daily difficulties around food and eating? I, for one, had it pretty easy losing weight (keeping it off is harder, yeah) but I'm sure that if it had been a lot harder, I'd've been psychologically better off staying quite fat and probably better off physiologically too. Stress does bad things to your body as well as your brain and, in fact, can contribute to higher fat gains for the same calorific intake and expenditure compared with an unstressed person. I was lucky. I was one one of those people who was "ready" to lose weight and in a position to spend the time and effort controlling intake and learning about food, nutrition and fuelling my body "properly".


For that last group of people... they're probably much better off staying as they are. Maybe not 100% happy, but happier than they would be struggling, succeeding, failing, getting even bigger, struggling and stressing again, succeeding, and being unhappy with the constant battle.