The Weight Room

Without going into super science mode I’ll quickly cover the role of muscle in the endurance athlete.  Glycogen is a substance in the body stored as carbohydrates (excess glucose).  The body stores glycogen in the liver and in the muscles, with the majority being stored in the muscles.  Carbohydrates are easily processed by the body; this is the reason gels, sports drinks, and energy blocks are pretty much pure sugar.  The goal is to get that delicious sugar converted to glycogen and store it in your muscles.  The rate at which glycogen is replaced depends on two main factors, fitness level (training) and muscle mass.  The goal of training is to shift deeper and deeper towards the inner body processing of an “athlete”.  The goal of weight training is to produce more muscle mass in order to increase the rate at which the body can replace glycogen.  While it is true we need muscle mass to keep the body running, biking, and swimming, it is important to pack muscle in to every crevasse to keep a balanced body capable of replacing glycogen at a “rapid” rate.  Enough science!

As a clarification, when I use the term lift regarding my own workouts, I am referring to my upper body.  Running and biking are tedious, but if you can handle your own thoughts for hours of boredom you can do it.  Weight training is a demon that constantly wants more.  This demon is in your head through the entire workout telling you to up the weight or blast some muscle that really has no purpose other than looking good.  This demon is what has guys in the gym flexing in the mirror and lifting their shirts to check their abs in the middle of the gym.  Lifting is all about fighting this demon.  For the first 3 months of lifting I wore a sweat shirt to the gym, I didn’t want to get sucked into the “lift more weight” mindset.  Occasionally I wear a stop watch (yeah, around my neck) to the gym to keep track of time between my sets; I look like an idiot and that’s fine.  I had to think of lifting as a necessary burden and not as a way to “look better” or “get bigger”.

The early stages of weight training were difficult.  I was use to wanting to lift more.  If one set of weights felt easy I would move up the rack onto a heavier set; I needed to fight that urge.  I started the middle of October 2012 with 20 repetitions of each upper body lift.  There was no race; I had time to ease my body back into weights after only running for so long.  Once again, this was rough mentally.  I would lift two to three times per week.  Each session was aimed at the entire upper body to ease the conflicts between cardio and lifting.  In mid November I decreased my repetitions to 15 and increased weight.  In January I reached my hardest lifting phase and dropped to eight repetitions with the heaviest weight I would use all year.  In late February I shifted back to completing between 10 and 15 repetitions of each exercise. 

The most difficult thing to conquer in the weight room was the desire for aesthetics.  By mid February I had logged 200 hours of training.  Sans Ironman, this kind of time in the gym could have massive results in body appearance and overall muscle mass.  That tricky little brain always wants to shift workouts up a gear for some of those glamour muscles, but that’s what training is about… taking control of your brain.  I had a weight cap for each exercise and I fought my brain to keep my workout within those caps.  If I got stronger it meant doing more repetitions instead of adding more weight.  If I moved from 10 pull-ups to 15 pull-ups, that was that.  It didn’t mean it was time to grab a dumbbell between my feet, it simply meant do more pull-ups.  I can’t truly explain how difficult it is to fight the brain in these instances, but it is brutal.  If I worked up to 15 repetitions of my cap weight doing dumbbell shoulder presses my brain would practically yell at me, “Let’s move down the line and add 15 pounds to that!”  The answer is (almost) always, “No.”  Sometimes you feel really great and you just do it, and it feels good… sometimes you just can’t help it.

In May lifting was decreased to twice a week, or even once.  From that point on lifting was about preserving muscle and shocking the nervous system away from endurance cardio.  If I do a heavy run and can feel it the next day I may go lift to stay off my legs while they recover.  Most of my exercises I capped at 50% to 65% of my body weight.  Every once and a while I catch myself wanting to test my limits; I have to talk down the lifting demon and decrease the weight.  Sometimes I feel like I have an ace up my sleeve.  People who get big are showing all their cards.  If I walked down the street in jeans and a t-shirt no one would suspect that I can run a marathon or bike aggressively for five hours.  There’s something delightful about that fact.  It saves me from getting into pissing matches with people; you can’t “flex” a long run.  There’s no reason to “race” anyone or talk up what I can do, I’ll just go do it when I need to.

Lifting is another topic I have no relevant pictures for.  So here’s a sunset from the Olympic Peninsula.

The Diet

Maintaining a “healthy” diet has been my weakest link in the endurance training realm.  I have an addiction to energy drinks and soda.  Energy drinks were easy enough to kill off after college but soda still lurks.  So to me the greatest part of long runs and rides is the sweet, sweet, tasty sugar.  The hardest part about training is attempting to avoid lying to yourself, so many of my workouts have been celebrated with soda and candy to “replace carbs.”  But in reality, with some exceptions with ingredients here and there, endurance foods are all varying forms of sugar.  Gels, chews, and sports drinks are made of sugar.  This is what I get to eat all the time, and it’s great.  These foods are also the reason I can’t stand the “sugar is bad” argument.  That argument makes me angry because it’s all about context.  Little Jimmy Joe sitting watching nine hours of TV is going to suffer eating 600 calories of sugar while an endurance athlete on a two hour bike ride is going to prosper from that sugar.

So back to actually training and trying to be a good little endurance athlete!  The best days have an absence of true meals.  I just eat all day at work, at home, in the car.  I eat something roughly every 2 hours.  A solid training day (with an actual meal) would look something like this:

Pre-gym 4:30 – balance bar

Post-gym 7 – banana and dried coconut

10’ish – PB&J and a soda

Noon’ish – brown rice and an apple

3’ish - dark chocolate and a banana

6’ish – spaghetti and meatballs

9’ish – cereal

This isn’t super great; I could stand to eat more before I started work.  I also am TEEERRIBLE at eating vegetables.  But regardless of the foods filling each slot I was shooting for around 3000-3500 calories to facilitate a day with two one hour workouts.  On heavy distance days I aim for 60%-70% of my daily calories to be carbs.  People make comments that I get to eat whatever I want because I’m so skinny and I train a lot, this couldn’t be further from the truth.  Two hours of working out gives me an additional 1000-1200 calories.  As much as that sounds like… I could eat that in ten minutes after a heavy workout.  In addition to that I could let my hungry little gut trick me and continue to eat meals that size countless times throughout the day.

The things I keep on hand for buffer foods include nuts, dark chocolate, fruit, soda, and crackers.  If it requires a plate I try to avoid it.  The largest carb heavy savior I’ve found is spaghetti.  I can buy a five pound bag of 97% lean ground beef and package it into four ounce freezer packs.  No matter how lazy I am it’s hard to beat boiling some whole wheat noodles and throwing a four ounce beef block into a skillet.  Dump on some sauce and there’s the meal.  Easy.

I keep in mind that the exercise is always the more important than the day’s diet (in my opinion).  A bad food day is NOT an excuse to have a weak workout or skip it.  Yesterday, like literally yesterday, I had a rough day with life and my daily food intake was a bowl of cereal, a soda, 54 oz of beer, chicken strips and fries, three peaches, and 5/8 of a coconut cream pie.  Now, I don’t know how you fine folks of the internet would rate that diet, but it was just a terrible day.  Now it’s a new day, and a new workout, and the failure of yesterday is just ember in the fire.

Now that I’ve started this blog, this means I can rant.  So it’s time to rant… ready?  Failure!?!  Failure is NOT an absolute.  This is why the wise pipe smoking owl is on my training binder.  “Ever tried?  Ever failed?  No matter.  Try again.  Fail again.  Fail better.”  For some reason it’s human nature to fail at something and believe that failure is such a negative word with such drastic weight that they can never try again.  Failure is a thing that happens; I’ve failed at countless things in my life.  That coconut cream pie I ate over half of yesterday?  That was a pretty large failure on my part, but there is no reason that should affect my life right now at this moment.  I’ve learned (that when life gives you lemons, eat a pie), I’ll adapt, and I will continue to work towards failing better.  The successes I’ve had in life would have taught me nothing without the numerous failures standing behind them.  Flaws, failure, imperfection… Good.  I feel sorry for the individual that succeeds at everything on the first try, it sounds so boring.

In rereading this all I’ve decided that diet is a necessary topic, but it’s boring.  Really boring.  The next posts will center around the actual craziness that goes through my head while training, dealing with the monotony of training, and whatever else I come up with. 

And because there aren’t any pictures related to my diet, here’s Crater Lake.

 

Finances, Starting Out, and 140.6 Miles: 2.4, 112, 26.2

It’s been recommended that I start out with what exactly an Ironman entails.  We get the grand joy of swimming 2.4 miles with a deadline of 2 hours and 20 minutes.  Then we get to bike 112 miles by 10 hours and 30 minutes (total).  Finally, after sitting on a bike for some insane amount of time, we get to run a marathon (26.2 miles).  The deadline for the race is 17 hours.  This sounds like fun, right?  ‘Cause let me tell you when I clicked “submit” while registering for the event… I had a brief moment where it felt like I was swallowing a cinderblock.

I signed up for the event with a friend; the various locations were booked up leaving us with Mexico (ehhh) and Texas (ewww).  Then we stumbled upon the Ironman in Canada, which for some reason had a later registration opening.  We waited until the day registration opened and we both signed up.  The ironman cost $625 dollars, which kind of floored me, but what can you do?  The best part was since it’s in British Columbia I also paid $75 in taxes!

Before I registered I had bought some gear knowing that I was at least going to branch into shorter triathlons.  But as a whole before I bought anything, I needed: A new bike, peddles, bike shoes, bike saddle, a wetsuit, tri-shorts, a race shirt, good goggles, new running shoes, a hydration belt, GPS watch, more various accessories for the bike.  Using Amazon and shopping sales I was able to get a lot of my gear at a good price, but in the end I probably invested about $2,800 (including the race fee).  But looking back I’m thinking that isn’t too bad considering that I’ve gotten about a year’s “entertainment” out of this event.

Once I had completed the 2012 Portland Marathon I began logging my workouts in preparation for the Ironman.  I logged almost every workout for about 6 months.  I had two slots for each day, one for my goal and one for my actual workout; most days I was aiming for two solid workouts.  Looking back at my logs I can remember stressing the importance of recovering from the marathon before I shifted to long endurance training.  A few days after the marathon when I was easing back into activity I actually logged “nap” as my first workout.  The binder that houses these logs is perhaps the most important piece of the Ironman to me.  I have sections where I’ve logged all my calories for a six week period, my body composition tests, firsthand accounts of races from various people, training information, nutrition information, glycemic index tables, and on the cover is the owl with his grand advice.  This binder is a major source of motivation to me because it shows the effort and time I’ve invested.  To my knowledge I am the only person who has ever seen the contents of my binder.

I started swimming in October.  Swimming was the most difficult area for me.  I hate putting my head under water and I don’t go in water much.  In fact, up until I actually started swimming for training my family was convinced I couldn’t swim.  October is when I began waking up at 4:30 in the morning (aaalmost) everyday.  Swimming requires getting to the gym as soon as it opens so I can lock down a lane for myself.  The hardest thing to adapt to is practically force feeding yourself on the drive to the gym because your body is having trouble even processing why it’s up and moving.

This is where I end with a life lesson I picked up from training: working out first thing in the morning.  In the evening the gym is a mixture of people getting off work or slowly trickling in after finishing their evening tasks.  Personally, I may get invited somewhere or meet up with friends and the evening workout never even happens.  The gym at 5am?  These people are getting their day started with something important to them.  The day hasn’t even started yet; this is before work, before the kids get up, before worrying about which tie to wear.  For me it meant that there was virtually no way I was going to get a call from work.  The ambiance of the gym at 5am is amazing, even though nothing is truly different than the evening.  At 5am I won’t receive texts, calls, dinner invitations, or drinks at the bar; my workout goes uninterrupted.

The beginning of this blog

I have created this blog with multiple intentions.  The first is to openly inform anyone interested about what it has taken to train and prepare for an Ironman race and other races, and to continue to do so for events in the future.  The second is to let people know that fit and athletic people have issues reaching, maintaining, and progressing when it comes to fitness goals just the same as an individual just starting out.  The third is to venture into the possibility to eventually becoming a sponsored athlete.  My final goal is to hopefully help motivate people in any way possible.  My perception of what is possible to achieve has been progressed drastically over the past ten years; it’s never too late to get started on anything, and no person or any dream is ever a lost cause.

My first marathon in 2012 came out of left field.  I lost 20’ish pounds over the course of the year from running; it was just a gym activity to become more fit; I ran three times a week for 45 minutes.  At a barbeque in August of 2012 I was talking to a girl I had never met and she discussed hoping to one day run a marathon.  My brain started churning, “Yeeeah, a marathon, that’s a good idea.”  Later that weekend I set out on a run, this was my test.  I had concluded that if I could run ten miles and feel pretty solid when I was done I would register for the Portland Marathon.  I ran my ten miles, felt like a beast, and registered for the marathon when I got home.  I only had six weeks to train, so that’s what I did.  I picked up a training guide from a friend’s sister and used the last six week section as a rough guide to where I should be.

The day the marathon came I really had no idea what to expect.  My mp3 player had an assortment of specific tempo music to keep my cadence through the whole race.  When I finished the marathon I felt like a king.  I had succeeded at a crazy goal with far too little time to properly prepare.  The “crazy goal” is pretty important to my story; in hind sight I don’t consider it crazy, but I certainly did when I registered for the race.  Crazy goals are the best ones.  You will never succeed at that crazy goal, turn to look back at it and think, “maaan, that was sure stupid.” 

So at this point in life I have one month (to the day) left before my Ironman race.  I intend to write about my initial training, the investments required both financially and of time, and my feelings and changing thoughts towards the race.  I hope that people have a genuine interest in the road travelled.  It’s not so much about what I’ve accomplished to this point, but about what others can pick up from such a trek and possibly reopen past “crazy” goals.

If people have any specific questions or interests feel free to email me justin.sunnarborg@gmail.com I will post about anything related to life and training, so don’t hesitate to be curious.

And in all honesty I would love if you would let others know about this blog.  I’m hoping to update very frequently at the front end since I’ve got a fair amount of past time to cover.