Fueling for Training

One week down and a lot of early mornings, but we've made it through so that's good. Some new things have been added to our daily diet - a good number of pills to make the body work better under the load of training. First off is a double-dose of Flaxseed oil for anti-inflammatory, a multi-vitamin for general health, vitamin C to boost the immune system and....well, I guess that is all of the normal ones. Though we did get to start the training with an anti-parasite to...umm...clear out the internals....nothing more to report there. My new coach believes that you have to keep the body well fueled and treat it like the racing animal that it is....similar to a race horse. You would de-worm a racehorse and give it the supplements it needs, so you should do the same for yourself. Seems to work pretty well because my energy levels have been very good so far.

Kristi is getting used to waking up early, though some days she just keeps an eye on me from bed while I drip away in front of the TV on the stationary trainer. Speaking of trainers, they're not cheap down here!! Instead of getting something new, when my bike got repaired the shop ended up having a used one to sell - which so far, though noisy and sometimes a bit smoky, has done the trick without breaking the bank. It was a very opportune time to need to replace a tire on my road bike though (along with the spoke and such), as the old tire now can get shredded by the trainer while saving the life of my tri bike's racing tires!

The trainer was only the first of our accomplishments this week - we also made our own powerbars! Kristi found a recipe online for some bars and we had most of the ingredients so gave it a go. The first batch tastes good and I'm looking forward to enjoying them on the bike and maybe sneaking one to munch on at work every once in a while. During our weekly market run we also picked up a bunch of dried fruit and nuts to add some flavor to the afternoon snacks that we pack - definitely looking forward to some of the mixes we made! (we came up with 8 different flavors using figs, pineapple, cranberries, banana chips, pecans, almonds, walnuts, apricots, pretzels and of course - prunes!) It was pretty surprising how many snack baggies the dried fruit we bought made up - goes to show that doing things at home can be healthy and relatively cheap!
All the training has had some effect on our schedules - up before 6, to bed before 11, and scaling back our wine consumption (though my coach has said that a glass a day is totally fine!) I even woke up before 6 on Saturday morning (though I did go back to sleep for a while!) :-)