Real food vs manufactured nutrition

The Family and I are trying to eat better.  For us that means eating food that's fresh, less prepared foods, less packaged carbohydrates, fewer refined sugars, etc.  The standard stuff you read about these days in the hippie-foodie-Michael-Pollan sort of circles. But then when it comes time to exercise it seems like the go-to nutrition is powdered drink mixes, packaged gels and bars with multi-year shelf lives, etc.   Why the disconnect?  Sure - there's a need to absorb nutrition and replace electrolytes under adverse conditions, and it's hard to carry a fruit-spinach smoothie on a 5 hour bike ride.

But is there any middle ground between the foods I like to eat when I'm not exercising and this pre-packaged chemical soup I've been buying?

Part of training is working out nutrition issues and learning how your body reacts to foods on the go.   (The harder you're working, the less your gut may be able to digest, and thus the "pre-digested cake frosting" Gu packs and "replace the sweat" Gatorade.)   One of the first things I got for my new bike was one of those "Bento Box" food holders in an attempt to carry more food, bulkier fresh foods (well, fresh like a PB&J sandwich), and keep it right in front of me so I can see it all the time and grab it easily.

So far I really like having the food there but I still fill my bottles with Gatorade (Pro, with twice the sodium) and stuff the Bento Box with Clif bars and Gu.   I add the occasional bag of home-made cookies and PB&J sandwiches and so far I haven't been riding so hard that I couldn't ingest them, so the experiment is working.   I'm changing slowly.

Today I read this article from a guy that articulates my thoughts more clearly than I can, and has a company that's trying to offer an alternative:  Up Close with Allen Lim, from Skratch Labs.   Interesting...

Building a very wide base

The official training program for Team In Training doesn't start until December but I'm not just sitting around until then.  I'm already prepping for the real training by starting slow and building gradually.  It's important to stay injury free over the next 14 months so I have to be smart about this and not over-extend myself too quickly and get myself hurt. The first few months of the official training are called the "base" period.  These months get the body ready for regular intense exercise and get it used to working hard and recovering.  Normally the base period lasts a couple months but in my case it'll last much longer, and that's fine.  The longer the base period, the stronger the foundation on which to build.

I've picked up a few books on training but the one I like the most is Joe Friel's Going Long book.  I've read each chapter at least one time, and some of them I've practically memorized.  He's a big advocate of building a wide base and concentrating on endurance instead of speed, especially for people new to the Ironman distances.  For sports I'm weak in he advocates repetition instead of length.  In other words, better to run 2 miles three times a week than try to run 6 miles once a week.

To that end, I've been trying to get in at least two runs and swims per week, building a solid muscle base that won't get injured.   I'm using Garmin Connect to track my workouts for now, since it's free.   It's super-basic and has virtually no scientific analysis capability, but it does the (basic) job.   Here's what my August training schedule looked like:

August Training Calendar

Click for a larger view...

As you can see, I'm doing a great job with the swimming (which are yellow), fitting in two or three swims per week.  Swimming is really easy to fit in because I can do it on the way to work or on the way home, and there are always free lanes in the pool.  I'm fitting in some running (in blue) and keeping my pace low. I'm biking most weekends and that's it.   That's probably enough for now since I have a deep base on the bike already and I'm doing a good job of long long without going too hard, although I keep putting in more hills than I should.

And I've even managed to get one brick in, with a 20 minute run after a long, slow ride!   By the way, the grey "HR study" is an occasional thing I do to measure my resting heart rate from time to time.   I just like to check up on the resting pulse from time to time, although I'm not very consistent about doing it under the same conditions every time.

If I can keep this up until December then I'll probably be in excellent shape to start the harder training when the group workouts start up.   That's the goal at least - go often, go slow, don't blow up, don't break down.   Meanwhile I'm collecting some great data on run pacing (vs. heart rate), bike pacing, gearing, etc. and really getting to know how my body responds to this new approach to training.

Remember:  I'm doing all of this not just for myself but to raise money for Leukemia and Lymphoma research.   If you'd like to contribute to my cause and encourage me to keep pressing on, please visit my donations page.

In memory of Greg

It is with great sadness that I must share the news that my good friend Greg Junell has died.  He lost his battle with Lymphoma on Saturday morning, about 2 months after a "bone marrow transplant" of stem cells from donated umbilical cord blood.  This is the person I mentioned when I spoke about being inspired to Join Team in Training, so his death hits very close to home for me. Saturday was very difficult for us, spending the entire day glued to facebook, watching everyone's updates as the news spread and people poured their hearts out.   The sadness of the day was tempered by lunch with friends, a toddler's birthday party, and dinner with other friends.  The same facebook updates that made us so sad also lifted us up as we saw how Greg had touched so many people over his lifetime.  The outpouring of memories was truly spectacular.   When I die I know only a small fraction of that number of people will notice that I am gone.

The last time we saw Greg was on July 1st while passing through L.A. on the way to San Diego.   We happened to catch Greg at a good time, when he was awake and pretty lucid.   We were running a little behind schedule and the little one was getting hungry but it was so hard to bring our visit to an end, given how infrequently we get to see him.   He made me a heart of pipe cleaners and gave Erin a home-made calling card that he was giving out to other patients on the floor advertizing his room as the place for fun, games, poker, and chatting.

At the time he was still having pretty bad diarrhea and his graft-vs-host disease was bothering him but his spirits were high.   He told me they were aiming to check him out of the hospital in 30 days or so, and that he would be returning directly to SLO instead of to an off-campus recovery facility.  This was incredibly good news!

I wish like hell I'd recorded our talk, but I can remember a couple important things.   We talked about his condition, the hospital, the drugs he was on, his exercise routines, etc.  But the biggest thing we talked about were his goals.  I asked him what he planned to do when he got out and although I don't recall his exact words, it boiled down to how he thought of himself as a Bhudda.  I didn't understand what he meant so I asked for clarification and he explained that he sees him self in the role of someone who tidies things up.

His view is that he came to this earth and noticed some things that could use a little tidying up and he's doing his part to make things a little better.  He told me that there was still work to do and he looked forward to continuing that work after he got home.  He showed me his different notebooks where he took notes about everything from friends, doctors, projects for later, etc.

As everyone who knew him is pointing out, he was driven to selflessly make the world a better place.  It is no coincidence that he was a high school teacher.  So many people now think to themselves "What would Greg do?" and for good reason.

We left Duarte that night and headed down to San Diego for a great vacation with friends and family.  Since I moved away from SLO I've always spent more time thinking about him than actually getting to hang out with him, and we did a lot of thinking about him over the rest of that vacation.  That's when the idea of doing Team in Training really made sense to me.  I think it was then that I knew I was going to do that for him.

Being far away for the last 9 years means I couldn't be there for him the way other people were over the course of his three battles with cancer.  Raising money to cure cancer is the thing that I can do for him.   His death means that the money I raise will not benefit him directly but will go on to help others like him.  There are other Greg Junells in the world - people loved by families, people who do good in the world, good people whose lives will be interrupted by cancer.  The money I raise will hopefully make their go of it easier and I'm sure that he would be pleased with that.

My vision was that Greg would recover from this round of lymphoma and go on to lead the kind of active, healthy life that he had always lived.   It was my dream that he would be able to join me in Tahoe in September of next year and have a good ol' time on race weekend with me.

My original plan was to compete in honor of Greg but now I must compete in memory of him.

You can read what people have to say about him here: http://www.memoriesofgreg.com/

You can read his blog from the last few years here: http://www.greghowareyou.com/

You can read more about my fundraising effort here: http://pages.teamintraining.org/sj/irnmnltt13/bjohnsuovy

A look at the IM Tahoe course

Here's a short video that describes the course for Ironman Tahoe: Ironman Lake Tahoe course

The first minute or so is pretty cheesy but the real info starts at 1:18.

Update:  The run course has since been changed to be two loops, each going only half the distance.   This means all the running will be on the Truckee River bike trail and the run course won't actually reach the lake.   I guess they did this because it's much cheaper to run the race without closing parts of the main loop road but it's going to make for a very crowded bike path.

Let’s do an Ironman!

Mark your calendars for Sunday, September 22nd, 2013.   That is the date of Ironman Lake Tahoe and the culmination of my 14 month effort to raise money for the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society while getting myself back in top shape. I've participated in the Wildflower Triathlons for about 15 years now, completing the long course (half Ironman distance three times, 10 years ago) and the Olympic distance each year since then.  I was never into organized sports as a kid but I had a blast on the Cal Poly Triathlon Team as a grad student and I've been missing that level of camaraderie in sports ever since.

Although I've been coasting through the Olympic distance race at Wildflower for the last few years, I got some sort of new inspiration this May and I decided to step it up a level and get back to the long course.  I knew this would require some level of actual training, as opposed to simply riding my bike and jogging occasionally.

The same weekend I was having a blast at Wildflower my friend Greg entered the hospital for his third battle against cancer over the last 5 years.   It's August now and lymphoma is taking a heavy toll on him.   He's not out of the woods by any means and visiting him last month really drove home how difficult this has been for him.   His very survival depends on a huge network of support services, and the treatments he's received are the results of billions of dollars of research and development and years of hard work on cures for lymphoma.  Looking back on the impact Greg has had on me over the last 20 years drove me to figure out some way to help.

These two things are now interrelated.  By joining the Leukemia and Lymphoma Society's Team In Training organization I will be committing myself to raising thousands of dollars for LLS to search for a cure as well as offer support services to those with blood cancer and their families.  Over the same 14 month period I will be getting into the best shape of my life, in order to complete one of the hardest events in sports.

Team In Training offers a unique proposition.  In exchange for a fundraising commitment to LLS they offer a full-throttle 10 month long training regimen, including workout with coaches, practice races, skill improvement clinics, etc.  There will be a group of about 40 of us from various backgrounds that will train together for an Ironman.  We will be together for 10 - 15 hours a week for most of next year.  This will be like some combination of Cal Poly's triathlon team, boot camp, and a reality show.

Obviously this is going to be a huge undertaking, on both physically and on the fundraising front.  The Family and I have had many discussions about this over the last month and we are behind this effort 100%.   I don't generally ask for too much from others but this will require a large amount of support from lots of different people.   From my family I'm asking for a huge time commitment in order to train.   From my friends and associates I'm asking for the financial backing to reach my fundraising goals.  My official webpage with Team In Training is here, where you can monitor my fundraising progress or make a donation.

Regardless of whether I'm able to complete the race next September, this is going to be a blast.

Triathlon consumes my brain

[Edit: to find out why I was so consumed by triathlon thoughts when I wrote this post, see my next post to find out what the result of all this thinking was.] This post marks a change for me - a post that has nothing to do with photography.   It turns out that as things change in my life the photography ebbs and flows.   This has been a serious year of ebbing for me.  In place of photography I've been dealing with home remodeling, raising a kid, and trying to be good to myself, all while stepping it up at work a bit.   The photography has taken a back seat but I'm not too broken up about that yet.

Ever since Wildflower (early May) I've been thinking about triathlon all the time.   Over the years I've gone through phases of seriousness and lack-of-seriousness but this seems to be a big period of seriousness.   The family and I have been talking about what sort of commitment it would take to move back to the longer distance race at Wildflower next year.

Over the years I've attempted various training routines including moderate training, t-shirt training, and no training; but this year I'm considering something novel:  actual sustained training.   Like, planning workouts, logging them sticking to them, etc.   I seem to get slightly slower every year that goes by so if I'm going to step it up, sooner is probably better than later.

Perhaps next year will be a big year for me, which means this year needs to lay a string base.