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.