A Couple of things to bring me up to date (lastly)

Running and tiredness
I’ve been feeling tied again this week, and the weather isn’t helping. I wonder though if it is just that time in the training cycle were you’re just about to finish ramping up the training and start the peaking phase. There are also a couple of other things to take consideration A) am I eating enough to carry me through all of this training? And B) am I getting enough rest between running twice a day as well as getting in enough sleep.

With regard to A, I’m going to say No. I don’t think I eat enough throughout the day. So to find out how much I shove down my pie hole I’ll start counting calories. Apparently a man my size (6ft tall & roughly 165lbs – that was the last time I was on a scales, will have to get back on there to confirm) needs somewhere around 1600 Calories a day just to maintain the bodies functions, but someone of that size that also trains for Marathons should be consuming closer to 2800 calories a day just to maintain .....so far I think I’m falling short by about 800 calories per day.

For example let’s say I run at least 12K every weekday (a lot more on the weekends) and depending on the speed I run at I should be burning up anywhere between 900 and 1000 calories (roughly), so what this means is if you are just eating the bare minimum number calories and are running at this level you’ve removed half of the calories that the body needs to function and eventually it is this starving of the body will catch up to you and manifest itself in things like no energy (maybe I’ve just answered my own questions) If there is anyone with a medical or nutrition Background reading this feel free to add your two cents worth.


With regard to B, right now I’m feeling that tired that I had to cut out the second run of the day. So I am getting more rest between workouts but I’d rather be running twice a day. As most families with young children know you only get as much sleep as they will allow to get away with. In an ideal world we (the parents) would be going to bed pretty much around the same time as our children, so that we could get twelve hours of sleep a night. But we don’t do it....maybe it’s our fascination with Lost or Desperate Housewives or that there are just a lot of things to do that you can’t do when the little guys are around. I wonder sometimes how much we’d accomplish without TV to distract us now that it has become ubiquitous with modern living.

It seems that I always forget the lessons learned from racing the year before. It’s like once the new season begins my memory is erased and I’m starting over. Last year I recall having the same problems with my calves as well as having no energy. What never seems to leave my brain is the useless information. Which is great when I’m watching Jeopardy but kind of sucks as I forget important things like birthdays or how to configure a Router using the CLI. Is this one of the systems of the body not having enough energy to make use of those memories or am I on the road to Alzheimer’s?