Beef, it’s what’s for dinner.
It took awhile, but I am officially out of my training funk. Things got rolling last week about 35 miles into a long ride with Michelle and Sonja. I should say long-for-me, because for them that’s more of a warm-up, but for me it was torture. Thankfully for every up there was a screaming descent that I was actually able to keep up with them on (thanks for waiting for me at the top of the climbs!). When my breathing wasn’t too out of control (read: the first 5 miles of the ride) it was great to talk to them and hear their insights, especially after I told them about the St. A’s fiasco. It sounds obvious, but I hadn’t realized it until talking with them that I race best when I’m having fun…St. A’s was not fun and training had not been fun in the weeks following. That put things in perspective and I tried to have more fun with it after that, though it also helped that I started to feel good since….
….I started eating red meat again. I’ve struggled with iron deficiency anemia since 2004 when I was but a wee freshman at BU. Every once in a while I’ll get lazy about taking my vitamins or eating certain things (OJ and red meat) and everything falls into a downward spiral. I get tired and cranky and my training completely falls apart. I think after a few weeks of no vitamins and very little meat, it all caught up with me the week after St. A’s. I tried to correct it, but it takes about 3 weeks to get your iron count up, so I just started to feel the effects of it last week…right around the day after the Shadow Mountain pep talk. Grill master Jordan Jones and his trademark cowboy burgers are largely to thank for the iron-boost (as well as enforcing my adult-vitamin consumption that I always want to switch out for the Flintstones variety that taste infinitely better).
Lessons learned:
When you can’t seem to get your training going:
- meet up with friends for a good training ride/run and let them point out things that should be obvious, but aren’t.
- look at your diet and see what’s missing or if you’ve changed anything recently.
If you think you might be iron deficient I highly recommend going to Boulder Center for Sports Medicine and talking with Matt Schneider. He’ll order the tests you need (serum ferritin) that often times general practitioners won’t order.
