Malnutrition Makes for Interesting Training

SWEEEET!!!!  Another week of training done and more fitness gained.  This week was my longest training week; my coach had me at 22:30 hours this week.  Add this in to the fact that it’s been eight days since my last off day and I still have tomorrow’s weight training and you can imagine that I am one tired dude!  In fact before it’s all said and done, I’ll have around 28 hours of training since my last off day (for those that don’t know, this is quite a bit).  I can say though that I can feel myself getting stronger and I’m ready to begin tempo training in another week or two.  I was thinking about writing an article about how to read and use the Performance Management Chart in WKO+ (and trainingpeaks.com for that matter), since I saw this fatigue coming and could plan on it.

I’ve also been discovering how food plays into my training more.  I’ve noticed, for the last several months, that I’ll often have a good day followed by a bad day on the bike.  I decided that I was going to actually track my calories carefully for a week and see what I was doing (whether that be bad nutrition, too many calories, etc).  What I discovered was pretty shocking!  It turns out that I generally shortchange myself by around 800 calories a day.  It’s strange to thing that this is the case because I don’t normally feel hungry and, when I am, I eat until I’m not anymore.  So, this weekend I’ve made a serious effort to ensure that I am eating all of the calories I need and it’s been A LOT more food than I thought it was going to be.  Holy crap!  I 1) never realized how much I was under eating and 2) had no idea how difficult it would be to eat this much!

I did have some misfortune, on today’s ride I was meandering up an easy hill in Louisville and my front shifter broke.  I pulled off on the side of the road and play with it for a for minutes and discovered that one of the pawls in the inside of the shifter itself had broken.  Since there was nothing I could do about it, I had to just rough it the rest of the way home in the big chain ring up a few more hills.  It made for a crappy 15 minutes, but it all worked out.  I plan to take  my bike to the shop tomorrow to see if I can get it warrantied or fixed since I’ve only had this gruppo for a couple of months.

That’s all for this week’s update!