Becoming IronAdam

Ok, i will assume this is my first week of ironman training, or at least first documented week. It’s been a challenging one. This past weekend, I ran 17 miles, biked 51 on a 2500 ft ascent, swam for 45 minutes, and did 5.5 miles of speed work yesterday with push ups, pull ups, and sit ups to finish it off.

Today, well, today is a day off. A well deserved one. But when I get obsessed with working out, these days off feel like a step back. Nevertheless, the rest days are probably the most important days of the week (from what I read). My muscles need it to rebuild from the damage inflicted over the previous few days. Active.com says that it takes about 2 weeks of inactivity to start losing what you have achieved. So what’s one day ?

Today i have serious shin splints. Tomorrow I plan on doing more speed work in the morning. I think though, how will I do it with the pain I feel today? I feel like this is the ongoing dilemma of training, and I’ll probably write about this over and over. I think a key point of training is learning to work through pain. Know your body’s limits, and push through it if you’re able. When your body screams stop, stop. But if it’s simply pouting, work through it.

I’ve also been hungry as hell lately. My god. I swear I ate a total of about 5 meals yesterday. I guess this makes sense given that I burned over 5k calories with just my two workouts on the weekend. But it’s weird eating almost twice as much as usual and still feeling hungry.

And I guess I need to get used to being more tired from weekends then my week at work. Mondays are brutal, and with the difficult, intense work weeks, each day just gets harder. I will need to change my sleep patterns to figure out how to recover.

So many things to consider when changing your training regimen to about 10 hours a week. I wonder what 15 hours a week will bring?