Training and nutrition

It's been a couple of days since my last post, so let me see...

Wednesday I did nothing. I was tired and didn't even want to go to yoga class, which is not even much of an effort. I didn't do a kettlebell workout either, even though I had scheduled Wednesday as one of my days to do kettlebell. Instead, I allowed myself to just go home from work and take a nap. Not ideal, but I was tired. So I let it be.

Thursday was a different story. It's our main TNT training day. I had been concerned that it might rain for our training as it had earlier in the day (we train rain or shine!), but it did not rain at all. I was happy about that because I cannot imagine it being comfortable at all to run in the rain. However, it was freezing! The saving grace when it's cold outside though, is that all one needs to do is run a lap or two and the cold is gone... a miracle, ha!

Since we got to the track early, I decided to walk/jog around the track a couple of times. Dana went once with me, but I went alone the second time. Seriously, I'd rather jog than stand there being cold! That did mean though, that I had gotten a half mile in before the training had even started. Yeah!

As training usually starts, we have to run two laps. So including my earlier laps, I was up to one mile very quickly. We then had announcements and warm up exercises/stretching before our real training began.

Here we go... the training for the day was intended to train us on our pacing. We were timed on a one lap, two laps, one lap, two laps, one lap (I think that order) with short recovery periods in between. The coaches explained to us that the way to set a good pace is to start off slow and finish strong. So as we went through the alternate lap distances, our times were supposed to start with slower times, and then end with faster times. Well, that is most likely the opposite of what people do as it makes sense to me that we would get more tired the more we ran, thus slowing our times down. But since I knew the objective was to do the opposite of that, I tried to pace myself accordingly. The first time around for a 1 lap, I finished at 2:30 minutes. Then, we did 2 laps, with my time being 5:16 (slower, wrong direction). The third time, which was a 1 lap, I did it in 2:16 minutes (faster, yeah!), but I practically killed myself on that one. I pushed myself really hard to get around the track that time and don't even know how I was able to do it. The next 2 lap time, I don't even know my time because the mentor who was keeping track didn't notice me coming in and by the time I got her attention to give me my time, she said she had turned her timer off. I was upset because I really wanted to know the time. But honestly, I walked some that time and know I didn't do well then. I was beat and it probably took me about 6 minutes that time. Then, they asked us if we had one more lap in us. I said no! But do you think they listened to me? So there I go one more time, with absolutely no energy left, and to be honest I don't even remember my time. I think it was like 2:45 minutes, pretty bad.

Well, ultimately I was unable to pace myself correctly. The good news is that I got a few miles in all together, but I have already run more than that at the gym before. So I was a bit disappointed in how hard that seemed to be.

Afterwards, we had a nutrition "class". Our coach's wife is a nutritionist and explained how important it is to have the proper nutrition in order to run. She said that your body simply doesn't have enough energy to do a run if you haven't fueled it properly. And I know I hadn't done that before I went. I only had a little Lean Cuisine meal a couple hours beforehand, which I don't think was enough.

So the food thing is still a big deal for me right now. I need to spend some time figuring out the proper food to eat, which has the best nutrition for running, while allowing me to lose weight as I train. I also need to practice eating in smaller portions more often throughout the day, as I mentioned in my last post, which was also backed up by what the nutritionist told us. So this is my project! Hopefully, this weekend I will find some time to plan and cook what's best for me going forward, because I surely don't want to keep running out of energy at only 3 miles!

Tonight, I'm thinking about running a bit at the gym. However, I plan to run with the kids in the morning. So we'll see if I will actually go tonight. I have just been feeling so tired lately. I know, it's the food!