Last Big Ride before the Big Race
Sunday, 3 January 2010
Those of you who have been following my two week crash diet / crash training
escapades offline (okay so, not many) will be wondering if I have actually
physically crashed off the bike by now.
I started out with pretty much a zero training base (but a bike in good
order), an 85 kg body (no major dings) and a looming bike race that was the
hardest physical activity I did all last year.
In fact, the Blue Dragon Challenge (a two person MTB race with roughly 50km of
racing over each of two days) was the hardest physical activity I've done in
the last dozen years. Poor old Johnno W dragged my sorry butt around the course
each day - he soft-pedalling nearly the whole way and me pushing for all I was
worth.
I had intended to get training straight after the Freycinet Challenge in mid-October but I
made a big gash in my leg by trying to clip the pedal into my left calf instead of my
shoe. That weeped and oozed for weeks every time I rode or ran (the hole still
hasn't closed over 12 weeks later) and then by the time I finally said
"stuff it I'm training anyway", I got sick and wiped off another two
weeks.
Which brings us to the start of my crash diet / crash training regime - three
weeks ago. With just 4 weeks to go until 'the big race' I figured thatI had
three options. I could:
1.
Try to lose weight so that I didn't have so
much to push up the huge hills, or
2. Train heaps so that I was fitter and able to
push my lardy frame up the hills, or
3.
Do both!!
Not one to do things by halves, I opted for option three.
After some reading I decided the low-carb diets had the best 'instant
weight-loss' potential. How low to make the carbs? Well, Dr Atkins advocated
30g per day. That's the equivalent of two slices of bread... Perhaps a little too
full on. Reading some more it seemed that even Dr Atkins was considered, hmm, ‘aggressive’
by the low-carb community so I opted for the "as little as I can get away
with, without looking like a nutter to a neutral observer" tactic. As long as said observer averts their eyes while I scan the nutritional information
section of any food I'm considering for it's carb content.
Most days this is around 120g per day. The NHMRC Dietary Guidelines for Australian Adults doesn’t have any specific numeric recommendations (boringly they like to consider all sorts of personal factors) but it does say the average carbohydrate
intake for males 25-44 years old in a 1995 ABS study was 317g per day. So I figured I was
making a fair sized reduction. Some days I'd get a little gung-ho and I reckon
I did a sub-50g day once - woohoo, look at me I'm slightly deranged.
Actually, that's not too far from the truth. For the first two weeks the
lack of carbohydrates floating around was having strange effects on my ability
to think, to make decisions and not walk into furniture. I'd recommend doing it during your
holidays sometime rather than when you're at work. And not around the Christmas holidays. Crash diets and
Christmas really don't mix. Probably to my advantage really, you can take a
good thing too far.
I lost 2.5kg the first week and over the second week (including Christmas
and New Year) I may or may not have dropped another kilo. I'm not too fussed;
at least I didn't put the weight back on. So, crash diet - tick.
That brings us to crash training. Trotting out the sessions I’ve done in the
last couple of weeks doesn’t really convey the impact, but the fact that I’ve
set up an AttackPoint log might. OK, so maybe some training info might help; I
did a two hour run one day (I was on Kangaroo Island without a bike for three
days and in my deranged state thought that my body was up for it), I rode my MTB up to the Springs (700m climb) three times in the first week, and I’ve done
not one but two hill interval sessions on the bike. But funniest example of
complete lack of focus or preparation was the pump session I did with Andrew
and Teri in Adelaide before Christmas. Actually, not completely stupid ‘cos the
hamstring and triceps work identified two glaring weaknesses; can I fix them up
with one week to go? Yeah, probably not.
So, today I went for a final big 3 hr ride with Johnno and Bernard only to find out
that John has done 38 hrs of training in the last fortnight (which puts my puny
18 hrs to shame). Johnno mentioned something about tapering off with just one
more ride this week (have I mentioned that he won the Mont 24hr Solo open men's category one year?) Secretly I wish he’d bang on with 2 – 3 hrs a day to make
sure his legs are good and trashed.
5 days to go until the first day of racing; how am I feeling? Great! I’m
still in for a world of pain tailing John around the course but at least I’ll
get round the course 20 minutes quicker than I would have a fortnight ago.
Would I recommend the crash diet / crash training method? I don't know. At least it's made a difference, but this
dieting thing is hard, really hard. You spend vast periods of every day feeling
hungry and not quite with it. Oddly, the craving for sugary food isn't there so much (don't ask me to explain the difference). Thank goodness coffee is low-carb. At least the training is fun (in
a nutty kind of way) and that provides a distraction. The whole shorts not
fitting properly anymore so I look like some teen model wannabe with my shorts around my knees thing is a neat vanity trick but the best lesson has
been that I can ignore the little voice in my head telling me that I need to eat
that muesli bar / biscuit / cupcake. It’s easy to convince myself that I 'need'
something because, 'I haven’t eaten enough', when really it’s just a con. Here’s
hoping that lesson sticks beyond the race.
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