Finally; consecutive HIM weeks

Today, I finished out my fourth half ironman week, but for the very first time it was the second in a row. I wasn't sure I was going to make it; as of Friday morning, I hadn't even gone swimming at all. I was hoping to at least do some swimming on Friday, and then I got called in to work for a few hours in the morning. When I got home, I got myself motivated and went for the longest swim I've ever done; just over 2 kilometers. The water looked rather smooth, but is was choppy, and in the opposite direction from what I'm used to. Then I came home, went on a walk, had a zoom call, slept for a few hours, then biked to work. All told, it was a day of three bikes rides and a swim. I started today at work, then biked home and went on the last run of the week (bringing my total for the week to just over 30 kilometers of running).

TDEE has not been going particularly well, but my weight is going down anyway. The effect swimming has on me is amazing. I feel lightheaded when I initially get out; I felt almost ready to pass out, even though I felt totally fine while swimming. And shortly after swimming, just about every time, I get ravenously hungry; way more so than after biking or running.

I may soon get promoted at work. If so, I will start seriously looking at places to rent or buy. Owning would be nice in a lot of ways, but neither option (buying or building) seems overall attractive. Building anything in this state is an administrative and bureaucratic nightmare, and buying guarantees that I will not own my ideal home. Honestly, I'd sooner buy a tiny home on a trailer and park it on an empty lot than try to build in any municipality around here.

TDEE is coming along

After looking more closely at the spreadsheet, I decided to enter my entire caloric expenditure for the day into the TDEE spreadsheet, not just resting calories. I'm finding it difficult to consume 160 grams of protein a day while maintaining a significant deficit. Partly this is because the replacement parts I need to fix my stove didn't arrive on time, so I've been eating mostly raw foods. As a result, I bought a big jar of chocolate-flavored protein powder yesterday, which turned out to be a surprisingly palatable way to get 60 grams of protein all at once. I also bought two packages of chickens breasts; I'll chop, marinate, and roast them to have on hand. Egg whites are also a protein-rich item with very little fat or carbs, so I bought a quart of egg whites. I intend to try replacing my morning four-egg breakfast with two eggs and some additional whites.

In any event, the first day of weightlifting went reasonably well; I estimated most of the weights accurately. I underestimated a few, but it will be easy to add five or ten pounds onto those next week. Today is day 2, with a new set of 6 exercises. I think I'll try consuming a protein shake immediately before I start my stretches, and then perhaps half an hour afterward the strength training, so I'm not rushing to catch up with the 160 grams later in the day.

Goals and plan

I apparently forgot some of the best advice I've ever gotten. If you want to exercise and improve, moving forward with just about any decent plan is better than not moving forward because you're waiting for the perfect plan.

I've modified the spreadsheet I'm using to track my activities and relevant daily statistics. There is a new tab specifically for caloric expenditure over time. If I want to add much strength, I need to add muscle mass. When I weigh 81 kg, I'm sitting at around 10 or 11 percent body fat, which is about as low as I can go without getting pretty extreme on my diet. Right now, I weight 85.6 kg; therefore, I could theoretically build 4.6 kg of muscle, the work of around 5 months with "beginner gains", stay at exactly the same body weight, and get down to around 10% body fat.

But my current plan is built to last about two months. Assuming that I can add 2 kg of muscle in that time, that makes my target mass 83 kg. The caloric expenditure spreadsheet is set to calculate caloric values at a loss of .5 kg/week. In terms of cardio, I'm going to maintain my goal of doing a half iron man cumulatively each week. I'm thinking about increasing the running volume, or possibly doing a full olympic triathlon once per week, but those modifications can come later.

For now, the main changes are going to focus on diet, strength improvement, and stretches. The changes for stretches are nothing much; still six days a week, but with 3 of each stretch instead of 5. For strength, I'm going to do a dumbbell-only program designed for 3 days a week (https://www.muscleandstrength.com/workouts/dumbbell-only-home-or-gym-fullbody-workout.html). It's originally designed to last 8 weeks, but I'm going to do at least nine; this first week is going to be for building familiarity with the routine and starting to dial in the correct weights for each exercise. I also plan to do 100 reps each of pushups, situps, and squats on saturdays; I worked hard to achieve that goal, and I don't want to lose that ability. For diet, I'm going to stick to a few simple rules. Rule 1, track absolutely every calorie I consume. Rule 2, eat at least 160 grams of protein per day, spread out over at least 4 meals that are at least 2 hours apart each. Rule 3, eat the number of calories recommended by the TDEE tab PLUS the "active" calories from garmin; only the TDEE-recommended calories will get entered onto teh TDEE tab, so that its math will continue to work properly.

3rd HIM week

Yesterday was Friday. On Thursday, I became aware that I was almost certainly approaching my strength training improperly. I was training too often, too consistently, and not using complex enough routines. So I didn't do any stretches or strength training yesterday or today, nor will I do any tomorrow (I never do on Sundays anyway). Friday's only exercise was biking to and from work. Today, I swam a short distance and went for a jog, which took me to my half ironman goal for the week. The run was unusually fast; I logged my fastest 1k, my fastest mile, and (I think) my fastest 5k.

Long story short, I need to buckle down and settle on my goals. do I want to maintain a HIM every week, train for a full ironman, or something else? Is my strength training for mass, performance, etc? Simply put, I'm wasting effort by failing to direct my effort at a specified goal.

As with most swim days, I got a fair bit done today. Grocery shopping, laundry, dishes, cleaning the litter box and cat fountain, filling my water jugs, and probably a few other things I forgot. Right now, I'm lying on the carpeted plywood floor of my home. I've been meaning to sleep on the floor for some time now, and I'm finally getting around to it. It's such a simple thing. I find myself drawn to simpler ways of doing things lately. Many meals have consisted of cold beans straight from the can.

I'm going to get rid of my stationary bike. It's old and shot. I can ride outdoors in just about any weather, and if I find that I can't ride outside for an extended period for some teason, I'll get a bike trainer off craigslist.

One mile per hour

As it turns out, that's about the speed I swim at, at least today. I never calculated my swimming in MPH before, but today i swam just over a mile in just under an hour. This was my longest swim ever by a fair bit. I was hoping to achieve 2 kilometers today, and do all my swimming for the week in one shot, but it got so dark that the navigational buoys were turning their lights on. I had a momentary cramp in my left leg part way through the swim, but it went away almost immediately, and I wasn't using my legs anyway (this swim was arms only). But, as I was heading in to shore, I had a cramp in my right leg that was so painful as to almost be disorienting. I wasn't afraid, mostly because I was pretty close to shore and wearing so much neoprene that drowning was basically impossible, but I was confused. Why would my leg, which I hadn't really been using at all for an hour, cramp up so badly?

I've said here, several times, that swim days are days of accomplishment. But those have all been days where I went swimming, and then got a bunch of stuff done afterwards. Today, I got a lot done at work before I came home and went for the longest swim of my life, and even filled a jug of water on the way home. Then, I talked on the phone with my dad for an hour, went for a significant walk, and washed all my swimming gear. My dinner was a craft beer and a cold can of beans, and I've rarely felt better. Both of my pairs of non-running shoes are wet and drying out by a vent, which is the reason (excuse?) that I'm not sleeping on the floor tonight.

I've been going strong with 100 reps each of pushups, situps, and bodyweight squats; I think this will be week 5 or 6. It's time to think about what's next. It's also high time to think about goals. Should I be focusing on body fat percentage? Total body weight? Something else?

HIM week, attempt 3

Thus far, I've achieved a HIM week twice, and been foiled twice. This week is going strong so far. I woke up at 9 PM on Sunday and couldn't get back to sleep. By 4 AM on Monday, I had finished my stretches and strength training for the day, so I took a very roundabout bike ride to work, covering a bit over 40 kilometers. Today, after work, I ran a 10K. So I'm on track to hit one major workout per weekday, even though this is a normal(ish) work week.

I've discovered some problems with my range. I shouldn't be surprised; it's original to my home. I've ordered replacement parts, but they are going to take about a week to arrive. Until then, the only cooking I'll be doing is either in my rice cooker at work or in my electric kettle at home. I'm not particularly bothered by it, but it does rather put a damper on how I've approached my mornings for the last couple months. Usually, I make coffee and fry 4 eggs while I'm doing my strength training, and eat right afterwards. Well, you can't really fry eggs in an electric kettle. So, instead, I had hardboiled eggs yesterday, and today just ate a cold can of beans with sriracha in it. There was a time I honestly would have struggled to even eat cold beans from a can. I didn't mind at all; I was pleased to have thought to add sriracha. Some may think of this as having fallen. I regard it as having risen. If only I could totally remove myself from the idea of food as anything but simple nourishment, at least in the context of a solitary exercise.

I need to get to work on making my beaten-up raleigh twenty into a capable triathlon machine. I should go all our on it; strip it totally apart, sandblast or strip it, rustproof the inside of the frame, repaint it, consider replacing the front fork to accept disc brakes, find an XRF-8 hub for the rear, get wheel built, the works. Really, my goal should be to get down to the two folding twenty bikes and no others; use the nicer green one as my daily rider with fenders and a trailer hitch, and use the other as a tri bike and a backup for when the daily rider breaks down.

I want to experiment with going back to sleeping on the floor. Imagine a world where I could more or less leave creature comforts behind; sleep on the floor, drink only water, eat only whatever is cheapest and nutritionally complete while being ethical, heat and cool my home only insofar as actually necessary, wear only what is necessary because of weather or other meaningful circumstances, not what people want to see.

New year, new opportunities to improve

 I finally took my bike in for service; I had noticed a faint wobble coming from the rear wheel. Apparently, I had managed to snap a spoke. As a result, I only got in two bike rides this week, one to work and one home; hardly the 100 km I was aiming for. That's what I get for not getting the brake cable on my folding bike fixed sooner.

I did achieve a 1,300 meter swim in 20 km/hr winds; my previous longest swim was barely over 1,000 meters. Today, a 5k run and a quickly 300-ish meter swim will bring me to my running and swimming goals for the week. I just need to wait for it to stop raining.

I weighed 83.9 kg this morning (almost exactly 185 pounds). There was a time I would have been very pleased with that, but these days I tend to shoot for 81 kilos or less. I've actually been thinking a good deal about this; I need to determine a proper goal, for a good reason. Really, in terms of health, body fat percentage is a much better indicator to be going off of than weight. Right now, I'm at 11-12% body fat, which is fairly lean for my age. I need to determine if I want to simply stay here, or just stay in a healthy range, or if I want to build more muscle. And if I do go the route of building more muscle, do I try to also cut fat, or do I accept a higher body weight?

I need a whiteboard and a "pro/con" chart.

I've been looking at EMT classes. I could probably become a paramedic, but I doubt I'd pursue it as a career; the pay is way less than I make now, and the stress is much higher. I don't even want the EMT training for a job, really, unless a solid position opened up in Montana for good pay (which I doubt is going to happen). I just want to be better trained to handle medical emergencies.