Sabotage

I haven't blogged in ages. I have thought about it on occasion, I have even made a couple of half-hearted attempts but ultimately, my heart hasn't been in it so I haven't bothered. It's a blog with few readers - I'm effectively talking to myself so that itself shouldn't really matter but it does because it's an attitude that has pervaded other areas of my life and it's making me feel wretched.

I know the advantages of eating and training well and I have let these things slip due to crappy health problems and the restrictions of caring for my mother. This was stupid, or if not stupid, at least backwards. I should have made a priority of those things in order to sustain myself and enable me to care for my mother and carry on with the rest of my life. What I find is that when two or more parts of my personal puzzle get out of place (e.g. eating clean and training), everything else starts to slip. I am more prone to fatigue, injury, poor sleep patterns, PMT and negative thinking. Letting these things fall by the wayside is the psychological equivalent of digging myself a great big bloody hole and jumping in, there to wallow in pity in the darkness at the bottom.

I posted elsewhere that "I have forgotten the face of my father" because it's a quote that's been echoing around my head for days. In essence, it just means that I am not being true to myself and if that's the case, no wonder I feel so crap! I also appeared to have forgotten the flip side of my situation. That is, if a couple of pieces going astray throws things out of whack, reinstating those very things will start to reverse the process and allow everything else to fall back into place. It's wonderful in it's simplicity.

So tomorrow is the start of a detox. I need to get my liver all happy again and, I'm sure, great things will follow.

I love this time of year. Plenty of inspiration from Wimbledon and the Tour de France and (sometimes) decent enough weather to get out there and train hard!

June is a bit of a double-edged sword though since it's also when school closes for the long summer holiday and nothing puts more of a crimp in your training schedule than having to keep a child entertained. Luckily, my boy is now big enough to do some training with me. It means adapting my routine and requires a little less rigidity from me but so long as I can keep active, I can stay sane. We played tennis this morning and he did some keepy-uppy (and pointed and laughed) while I did my hill sprints. The rest of today's training will have to wait till he is in bed. I'd be a liar if I said I didn't find that frustrating - I do! - but it's the best that's on offer at the moment. I cannot lift weights with him around. I have tried before and it was a miserable experience. I can't concentrate with someone talking at me the whole time. It's the same at the gym. During sets, the earphones go in, the gym face goes on and my headspace is my own. That's how I like it.

The clean eating is going well. I feel better already. It's something that continues to frustrate me - I know how much better I feel when I eat properly and yet I still go through phases where I don't and still manage to feel surprised when I feel like crap!
One of the few things that frustrates me about a high protein, low carb diet is the lack of crunch, or should I say crisp! I have a huge love of tortilla chips (hand me a big bowl of nachos and I'd be a happy girl) and I do miss those. I haven't yet found a replacement food which ticks all the same satisfaction boxes: savoury, spicy, crunchy, messy finger food. One thing that came close though are the cashew, walnut and sesame crusted chicken goujons we made. We scoffed them before we got a photo (oops) but they were surprisingly good. The nuts were crunchy on the outside,the chicken juicy inside and they held up well enough to repeated dippings in a bowl of homemade salsa. Win!

Kneehab is going to plan. I am woefully short on cardio fitness but no longer in daily pain so I can start to build that back up. Strangely, running uphill is more comfortable (for my knee, not my lungs) but hills do you good.

Just Keep Moving

Injuries have left me feeling a bit blah lately and with the blah comes the slacking off on the clean eating front and the drinking of too much wine. Put it all together and what have you got? A miserable, lardy, slug of a woman and that ain't me! Enough is enough.

I'm not going to focus on running events as a way forward at the moment. A 5K run is enough to trouble my knee so there's no way I can put in enough miles to enable me compete in anything. I've tried pushing through and that only resulted in pain when cycling as well as on the run. I think the thing to do is to stop beating myself up about it and focus on other areas of health and fitness so that once I'm fully recovered I'll be strong enough to get back into running with only a reasonable level of discomfort ;)

Over the next 30 days, there will be no alcohol and clean eating is back on the cards. I'll be sticking to a schedule which gives me an 8 hour long eating window each day in a bid to eliminate the late night munchies. This means fasted cardio first thing, followed by a late breakfast around 11am and staying the hell out of the kitchen after 7pm. I will also be doing press ups, crunches and squats (100 each day). This is not meant to do anything other than focus my mind properly. It's not a task which will be particularly physically taxing. It's more about the routine and getting myself tuned in to my goals again.

At the end of the 30 days I should be well placed to crack on with my next goal!

Overdue

Remember when you were a kid and you kept a diary or a journal? Yes? Good ... then you'll remember that you only ever had time to write in it when nothing was actually happening in your life. Turns out that blogging isn't much different!

There's a lot going on just now and I'm struggling to keep up with it all. I feel like everyone is getting a bit of a raw deal from me at the moment, like there isn't enough of me to go round. Ironically, there is plenty of me! Well, more than usual. Training-wise, I feel like this year has never really got off the ground. Running is being hampered at the moment by a niggly achilles (and the rest!) Unfortunately, it's also not comfortable when swimming. Time is hurtling on (apparently it's June already!) and I think I seriously need to re-assess what I'm going to manage race-wise. I'm not sure I'm in the right frame of mind to do that though. Currently, I'd just like to sack the whole lot off!

I won't do that but I do need to find a way forward and it's not clear to me just yet what that is going to be.

As ever, this is not the post I thought I was going to be making. Further health problems mean that I've had to take another look at what events I've got lined up and try and make a reasonable decision about what I'm realistically going to be capable of. This means the 40 miler is most definitely out of the equation and I can focus on the Thunder Run instead. It is mercifully both further away and also not so huge a distance.

Strength training isn't so problematic but running has been difficult recently. I'm hopeful that things will soon be under control and I can get back to it. In the mean time, I'm eating as healthfully as I can, taking all my vitamins and supplements and resting. I have also factored in a bit of excitement and indulgence!

On Saturday we are flying over to Denmark for a few days ... for the opening of this year's Giro D'Italia. I'll have my boy with me for the bagging of swag (for some reason they prefer to give away goodies to the kids!) and I have been assigned the task of acquiring a certain autograph for my BIL, that of this chap, Ivan Basso:

Not sure of my chances to be honest. The weather forecast is not good and if it's cold or rainy, the cyclists tend to stay on the team buses and I don't blame them - these guys have no natural insulation against the cold! They do, however, have the most incredible tan lines known to man.

I'm also planning to take my boy for a wee day trip to Odense. Lots of pics of it here:
Pretty buildings this way

The choice of destination has absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Odense is the base of one of the world's largest marzipan manufacturers: yum

As Mr Young used to say ...

... we're cooking with gas! Literally and metaphorically. I should perhaps point out that Mr Young was my high school Physics teacher. He was awesomely uncool and gave precisely zero f*cks about it. He used make us do lots of experiments with lasers so he could 'helpfully' puff on his pipe in class thus creating smoke so we could see the beams more clearly. He had many a naff catchphrase, one of which was: "We're cooking with gas!" He was, in short, rather ace and I was always very fond of him.

This week, I have been doing a whole lot of cooking. I haven't yet got over my fatigue issues. I have also eaten a lot more carbs than usual over the past few months. I know from previous experience that the two are not unrelated so last weekend I managed to smack myself in the head with a clue by four, decided to go back to my paleo-esque type of eating and what do you know, within days I was feeling brighter and more alert. I'm sticking with it from now on. Foccacia is like crack to me - enjoyable but ultimately just not worth it. It's not worth going there. This means I have had to be a bit more organised with my weekly shop but that's no bad thing. I quite like planning out my meals for the week. I enjoy food immensely and I look forward to all my meals so I quite like knowing when I wake up on Wednesday morning that I will be tucking into cashew and walnut crusted chicken later that night.

For me, this type of eating involves a breakfast that is more typically Scandinavian - proteins and salad rather than cereal - a lunch that usually involves an elaborate omelette and a dinner of fish/meat and veg. Sweetness comes in the form of sweet potatoes/yams and fruit (either before or after training). Oh, and protein pancakes! For me this type of eating works because it is mindful in that I have to plan ahead a little but I don't ever obsess about it. I don't have any wild cravings and, importantly for me, I feel I can eat a decent quantity of food. I don't like to feel that I'm going without!

As well as cleaning up my diet, I've been cleaning up my personal life too. I feel better for it and I now have something which has been missing for most of 2012:

Not to get too hippy about it but there's been a lot of hand holding and a sense of moving forward together. There's a kind of special synergy about at the moment and that means a lot to me. I tend to cut myself off when things are rough and, for the first time, I am really not doing that ... and it's okay :)

I've also introduced a new element to my strength training and I am loving it! We're going for the full on Strongest Man approach. More on that next time but for now, all I will say is Farmer's Walk - oof!

Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes

I'm easing myself slowly, oh so slowly, back into training and it's amazing the difference that it has made to my outlook. Just getting my body moving is calming my mind. It's like I've been away and am now coming back into myself. It's a huge relief but it has made me aware that I rely far too heavily on my training as a source of confidence and as a coping mechanism.

The fact is that stressful things will happen anyway and I need to have a bit more in my response arsenal than simply running, cycling, swimming and strength training. There are mental reminders that I need and physical things that I can do but most of all I need to remember that there are options!

I think it's easy to get bogged down in the day to day stuff you have to do, sometimes to the point where you forget what the things you actually enjoy are. This means any chill out time you get to yourself is often wasted and the stress mounts. There are lots of things which I enjoy and I'm trying to remind myself of that. During hard times, I withdraw and end up as a hard little ball of unfeelingness, a little stone, a kernel which is part of me but not the full story. It takes work to reawaken the rest, I forget that I am capable of feeling more, of being more. The pathways back to yourself are not always complex, momentum can be sparked by the smallest of things; a book, a film, making something, just being with people. I won't lie, I have had an absolutely foul week but in amongst it all, I have gathered some things to me which will help me in the next few days:

Reading Bath-time reading is The Catcher in the Rye. All other reading has been supplied in digital format by the lovely and generous Taff-man. Thank you sweetie :)

Watching I treated myself to a Hitchcock boxset. I still have some Twin Peaks to watch and there has been some proper anime geekage with the boy. I have to confess also to the watching of cheesy horror flicks! Shamed as I am to admit it, I have also been watching far too many re-runs of America's Next Top Model. It's my guilty secret.

Doing I've been cooking up a storm. We're mildly obsessed with Italian and Spanish food at the moment so there has been paella and a whole lot of tapas, gnocchi, focaccia and pasta as far as the eye can see. Everything features either olives (sorry Neil!), chorizo or both. I have a huge appetite at the moment but only for savoury things and generally, the hotter the better. We had Mexican food for dinner tonight at Pancho Villas and I scoffed all the stuffed jalapenos. They were lovely. Mind you, our very non-trad Easter meal will be chickpea curry - love it! I've also been getting stuck back into some more crafty/artistic endeavours.

The head stuff I guess this is where I often get stuck. I have a tendency to blame myself when things go wrong but this week has opened my eyes a bit. There has been a difficult situation going on for a while now and the longer it went on, the more worthless I felt. This week, I brought it to a close completely. I was tolerating things which made me feel horrendous simply because I was too conscious of not wanting to give offence, of wanting to remain civil, of trying to make things easier for everyone. In the end, it wasn't worth the effort and in all these months spent feeling progressively worse about myself what it comes down to is that at worst, I am guilty of poor judgement and naivety. The older I get, the more straightforwardly I present myself - this is me, some bits are kind of crappy and I have my faults but overall, I'm a decent person. It simply didn't occur to me that someone could get to my age and have such a lack of insight about themselves and their behaviour. Surely the rest of us gave up blaming the world for our own faults by the time we left our teens? Ultimately though, freeing myself from this situation has left me feeling better than I have in months.

It's also given me the conviction that I need to stay single (and celibate) for the near future. I want to get my fitness back on track, focus on getting my nutrition qualification and a million other things. This means complicated relationship nonsense has to go on the back burner for a while. Priorities!