Friday, September 27, 2013

Training weight, don't eat sand, coach freestyle, help 70.3 first-timer and Norseman

I almost wrote AGAIN how quick the time goes as it just did again, but I need to stop having that as an excuse for not writing here regularly and actually start writing here more often. So stop complaining and start doing.
During the last few weeks Ive had a several personal "projects" started. Some of them have been carried out already, some are in good progress, and, finally, some not. I thought I'd explain them shortly and see where that takes me (us).

Lose weight to train (and maybe a bit train to lose weight also)

Throughout summer I've swam, ridden the bike and ran whenever possible (I have some other priorities also in my life, surprise surprise). Tried not to take too much stress of that, but still kind of preparing for the REAL training regimen that will evidently come later in the fall/ winter. The main purpose for this has pretty much been keeping my basic fitness up, and my belly not exploding of all the stuff I'm eating (So train to lose weight). Five weeks ago we (me & my wife) decided to start looking what we actually eat, as it looked like no training had any effect on the number the scale provided. For me, this meant putting the carbs down at lunch & dinner, filling the plate with salad, greenies and some protein-source. I also started to look  more carefully for the portion-size, as I have the habit of getting really hungry before lunch, filling up the plate to a horrifying degree and then eating it all even if I'd be satisfied already earlier. For my wifee this meant trying out the now-popular 500kcal-days twice-a-week in addition to eating a bit less and keeping the excercise-levels the same.

Result: 6 kgs drop for me, and 5 kgs for the wife. My run has improved, and I don't know if it's because of the low-carb diet or something else, but my hr-readings have gone down also (so same speed - lower hr or same hr, higher speed). Not bad, not bad at all, especially as the changes have been sort of minor...

Start teaching people freestyle basics (swimming I mean)

I did this shortly last spring also, but now I have a class of 8 people and they will be getting 11 one-hour lesson once-a-week. I've now had three of them, and boy, has that been a learning-experience for me too. First of all, I realised I need to prepare for these meets. My preparation for the first meet was only to come up with the idea of getting to know the people and their needs towards the course. Well, the realisation that that initial "hello" took about 10 minutes of the hour was quite a shock, so what I did was try to improvize all sorts of stuff. And that didn't go well. I think I was the worst kind of ADHD-case during that first meet, and was really grateful of the people actually coming also to the second class (which I had prepared with actual training parts and a working timetable). So a BIIIIG lesson learned there on the first one. But a good one, now I am actually thinking of what people will be practicing and how much of different stuff can I fit into one hour without creating a mess. On an overall level, I get real pleasure from seeing the people getting the stuff and also understanding why they should use a certain technique instead of just treading the water. And them noticing the real effect of the technique change on their ease and speed in the water is nearly priceless :)

Not eating sand

Well, as you might guess, this is a wierd thing to encounter as it is really against any and all reason. And how tough it is to get rid of it in the first place!
Ok, just for a clarification, the person in question is my younger child, a 3-year-old boy, who, for some totally ununderstandable reason, with his mates in the kindergarten, has started eating handfuls of sand. At first encounter this was funny like "ok, kids just playing". Second time it was stupid, and the boy was told to stop it. The tenth time we decided we need to do something. For some reason the little guys have created some sort of game or play where they are stuffing the sand into their mouths. And encouraging each others to do that. So we needed to stop that. Not as easy as you would think, though... First it seemed that nothing helped. Now we have several different restrictions on the boy (e.g. no tv as long as the idiocy lasts, all "lightning McQueen" stuff confiscated (that was really hard for him)) and agreed with him that if he stays off the sand-eating for five consecutive days, we'll take him to his first real movie (the Planes). Lets see how things go there...

Wifee Half-distance training

On a sunday a couple of weeks ago I signed my better half for her first half-distance triathlon. That'll be due next July, 17th to be exact. So some time for the preparations still remain. But it was good that I did the registration for her, as no-one would have guessed that the national half-tri would sell out its 1 300 places in 22 hours from opening :o
But, I got the wifee in, and she's determined with her one-time-sprint-triathlon experience that she'll do it. And I'm sure she will, especially now as we both have been getting towards more reasonable weight considering the training. But I know I will need to drag her out of her comfort zone in some training-sessions to get her actually progressing on her training. I'll probably need a long stick there to keep the unavoidable aggression bursts on a safe distance.


Norseman 2014

Yes, I'm a stupid man. I knew that triathlon is getting ever more popular, but I didn't understand that it's hit the Nordics also. So two of the IMs I was planning on having in my back-pocket IF the lottery from Norseman didn't go my way are now off-limits (Copenhagen and Kalmar). Now I'm just biting my nails and awaiting for the enrollment to start and the lottery to happen, because that'll be the only chance I'll have for next year to do the ironman distance. Well almost at least, as I decided that maybe I'll just have to budge and participate a small national full-distance if the lottery will fail me. But we'll see. One side of me can't wait until the lottery on November, and another side does not want to get there as getting the invitation there would actually mean that I'd have to go. and even worse, TRAIN. Aaagh!!!!

Ok, so five present projects for now, I'll leave the rest for the next update :)

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