Everyone has a plan ’till they get punched in the mouth.
-Mike Tyson
As I sit here having some new found weekly reflection time, I look back on how incredibly off track this week was and the discovery that my training program and my race date are off by about 3 weeks in a bad way. It’s tough enough to maintain clean eating and focus on training when it’s your birthday it’s a whole other thing when your wife’s birthday is 5 days later with the weekend perfectly placed between the two. I made it through my day pretty unscathed but once the weekend hit things started getting cray, as the kids say. I was able to get my big runs in on Saturday and Sunday totaling 35 miles for the weekend. Then came Sunday night and the big birthday dinner at my parents house. The menu, mexican food, and it was awesome and almost all plantbased. From an amazing quinoa salad to a black bean sweet potato chilli plus all the chips and homemade guacamole and salsas, as expected from my dad. Though vegetarian it was much more calorie dense and sodium rich then I would eat normally, but non the less top notch cuisine. We ate like kings and I was good with that, but then came the literally 4 gallon sized ziplock bags and a Pyrex dish worth of left overs. The next morning I made the decision to rest except to ride my bike to the store for groceries. One of the great things about eating mostly fruit and vegetables is that I can eat all I want all day with no ill affect. The unfortunate thing is that my mind set didn’t stray from the habit of grazing with my fridge full of goodness, I slowly found my way eating bowl after bowl through out the course of the day until I had cleared just over half of my haul. Tuesday was my wife’s birthday and already knowing that we weren’t going to have the “cleanest” of meals that evening I still felt it was my mission to reach the finish line and make sure the rest of the left overs were finished, go big or go home I guess. This is where things really start to unravel. I did the unthinkable, I skipped a scheduled run, oh the shame, but I was quick to rationalize it with the birthday thing and I was going to hit up a spin class in the morning and run that night, no big deal I thought. It ’twas a new day I was ready to get back to it. I head to the gym, ironically on my bike to go ride on a bike that doesn’t go anywhere, with my 2 year old in tow. My enthusiasm was quickly killed by a large group of toddlers that filled the kids club to maximum capacity. “No worries I have tonight to run” I tell this to myself a few times. Once home I begin looking at my training schedule and realize I have eight weeks left of training but my race is under six weeks away. “No worries I have tonight to run,” well guess who forgot about “girls night” for my wife’s birthday? At about 10:15 that night I knew I wasn’t running. I couldn’t remember the last time I hadn’t worked out for three days in a row, and eaten so terribly to boot. Now I could be a total mess and be angry and disappointed with myself, but for what? I’m not getting those days back, I can only move forward! Today I awoke knowing I need to have better back up plans, during my giant green shake (extra green today) this morning I made the plan. First I’m going to fill the house with an extra amount of fresh fruit and vegetable to “clean” my system and second I went old school circa 2005 with P90 and banged out a workout, the bleeding has been at least slowed now. Tonight after trick or treating and candypolluza starts, I will run, my legs should be fresh from the break so I plan to ad an extra 2 miles to what was already scheduled. Time with our loved ones is not guaranteed so how can I be angry about that, three days is nothing in the scope of life. I will be back on track by Monday and will figure out how to fix those two weeks of training I don’t have any more.
Don’t sweat the small stuff…..
F2P