9 Months to Tri

Back to strength training today. I’m tired. My muscles are all sore from previous days’ workouts.  I finished yesterday’s workout with a 1 mile run, but it took me 13 minutes to complete it. There was just no way that I could go any faster. I was trying not to cramp up, and just starting the run out, I had to back off of my initial speed because I was literally about to get thrown from the treadmill.

Part of the problem is that I haven’t slept much all week. I have vacation starting Saturday, and many many deadlines, both at home and work this week, so I’ve been burning the midnight oil trying to finish as many as I can.  I really don’t want to drag any of this work into my time off.  Even so, sleep is increasingly becoming an issue, and I NEED to work the sleep issue out right now, or it will bring this entire experiment to a crash.

A number of things that I know are going on with sleep.

First and foremost, it just makes everything harder. When I’m tired, I work slower, my brain is less responsive and my workouts suffer. Also, since working out is a matter of pushing your body to its limits and  then letting it recover (or heal), my body is too tired to recover the way it should.  Simply put, I might be making better progress if I was sleeping better. And I’d probably burn calories more efficiently.

Second, I eat more.  An extra 3 - 5 hours a day awake means an extra meal or two.  That means more calories to have to burn. Which means I’m losing less weight.

Third, its coming on cold and flu season. The more tired I am, the more likely that I’ll get sick. I need to keep my body strong and rested in order to fight off these diseases and to recover more quickly if I do get sick. If I do get sick, I’ll lose a week or more of training, and I’d really like that to not happen.  Last year I lost almost an entire month of working out when I got sick. That just can’t happen right now. I used to go years without ever getting sick, then I had a kid. Now it seems like its a much more common occurrence.

Anyway, that’s my spiel on sleep. If anyone has any more information on it, please let me know, I’d love to have it.

Last night I gave a talk in my congregation (one of the afore-mentioned deadlines I was talking about) and I wore my suit jacket, something I haven’t done in weeks.  Its baggy.  Last time I wore it, it hugged my belly tightly, but last night, it hung so loosely, that it almost looked dumpy. Sweet.  I have a smaller suit that I’ll move into in another month I hope. Then I’ll take this one in to get it altered.

My winter coat did the same thing as winter ended last year, but now is fitting loose as well.  Any my wife told me that my jeans were looking really baggy and that I need to get some new ones that fit better.  This is going to get expensive.

Oh, almost forgot. I also talked to Jamie, but I’ll post about that tomorrow. I’ve gone on long enough today already.

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