"Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny." - Eric Hoffer
I took most of this week off from aggressive weight loss in order to recover from a cold. I still managed to lose a little, and I fought the cold off pretty quickly. To prevent more of the same down the road, I'll be taking the extreme loss down a notch to something sane as I continue, to keep from putting myself in the hospital.
Once again, I'm pushing myself too hard, this time with different results. The first time I was eating too little and walking and doing other aerobic work too much, and I wiped myself out. I left work early one day due to fatigue, and took the next day off to recover and chow down some extra Calories. I made a fast recovery, and decided that starving myself was a bad idea.
Before I got sick, I was dabbling in interval training to boost how long I can run without stopping, a long-standing problem with me. I can sprint for short periods of time, and recover quickly, but I can't run very long without fatiguing myself, and this will be a setback during the soccer season. In the one game I've played so far, I held out for a little while, but the game was called early. I don't know if I would have made it through the entire game or not, so I'm trying to make sure that the next time I play, I'll be able to. To train for this, I've been trying to sprint up these stairs:
This is located at Hoover Dam in Ohio, and is roughly a 45 minute walk from my house. It's a nice little area, and the stairs are a popular exercise spot for us locals. Here's a different shot of the dam, the stairs being out of frame on the left:
I've made slight progress, going from the halfway mark to about 3/5, and I usually make three attempts. Three attempts after walking 45 minutes down there. Before walking another 45 minutes back. With a dog. So when I get back, I'm pretty bushed. The mistake I made this week was trying to do that on the same day I did a strength routine, the same day I increased weight on a couple exercises, and thought my arms were strong enough for my first attempt at chinups since I began strength training. So my biceps were all torn up, as were my pecs, my back, and my abdomen, and then I went out for a two hour Calorie burning ordeal.
I slept well that night, and was plenty sore the next day, with a little scratch in my throat. "Oh," says I, "must be allergies from being outside all the time, bad pollen day or something." And I decided that evening to warm up with 150 Calories of DDR, before going back to the stairs at Hoover for another round.
That was Wednesday. On Thursday, my scratchy throat was a full-blown cold, coupled with my low Calorie diet and overexertion for two days in a row, and I was a mess, and called into work sick again.
This was all avoidable, of course. I think since I'm upping my strength training significantly, I need to add more food to the diet to compensate. I'll up my daily intake a few hundred Calories for a couple of weeks, and see how that works. Also, I clearly can't run a marathon on the same day I lift. Strength one day, cardio the next, and maybe one day a week as complete recovery. Slow and steady wins the race.
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