After a month without chocolate and sweets I may have over indulged on Wednesday. I consumed an XL cookie, two XL Twixes, approximately five homemade cookies (at work), a Turkish delight cookie and two small pieces of chocolate. I know now that the two small pieces of chocolate tipped the balance on an otherwise healthy sugar consumption ;)
Despite gorging myself on sugary delightfulness I ran my tempo run yesterday morning and well and truly smashed it! I have been struggling with my tempo runs all month. I put this down to not eating enough carbs in the day and running late in the afternoon when blood sugar tends to drop off. I've felt like I had no fuel to push faster.
Normally I don't run in the morning as I am a lazy sloth that prefers the afternoon. The upsides to training first thing are numerous:
1) I get to run on fresh legs and with a fully rested body. If I'm doing construction work then the last thing I want to do is push my body to its limit at 4/5 in the afternoon.
2) I set my whole day up for accomplishment. Whether the run is amazing or it's a struggle I leave that session knowing that I've ticked off a big part of the day straightaway. It gives me motivation and momentum to get stuff done.
3) Post training I get to move about. Whether I'm at Apple or doing construction work I am moving around. I'm keeping my muscles working, pumping fresh blood into the areas that need it to recover from training. It keeps muscles loose and prevents cramps. If I train in the evening I'm going to be sitting, eating and watching TV after, leading to less blood circulating through the areas that need it.
4) It gives me energy and makes me happy. All that you hear about the runner's high is true. When you reach that point in a run you feel invincible and when you finish you are buzzing. I've woken up lately feeling crap for no reason, the grumpy old man arrives. I don't like being that person, so why not change it with a run in the morning?
The big realisation for me this week has been how much I need carbs. I'm not going to apologise to all those friends that don't have sugar or do paleo. For marathon running and for me personally I need carbs. It's true that we don't need it in the form of cookies and we could all make some changes to our diets. But I perform better when I eat carbs. That probably just means I need to eat more brown rice in the day (I already eat enough vegetables) and not rely on simple sugars. But there's something in our body that makes us feel good when we have carbs, they balance out our moods, our biochemistry. Like anything in life it is about moderation and having some self control. Once we find the balance that enables us to train, work and live a happy and fulfilled life then we should stick to that.
I'll update you on my progress next week. Tomorrow is a ten mile (16km) run and I'm carbing up today in a sensible way, so I'm looking forward to a good challenging run.
Happy training!
Tom :)
- Posted from the modern day type writer
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