Riding less, lifting more

I haven't really had the time to ride much over the past week. The motivation is tough when I don't have people to ride with on short notice. The thunderstorms don't help either. Bernie and I will be riding together this weekend, which will be good.

Instead of riding I've been lifting. I shifted from 2 sets of 20 to 3 sets of 12-15 and upped my weights accordingly on Tuesday. A shift like that always means a day of pretty extreme soreness and stiffness. That should be mostly gone by tomorrow, though, which is good because I'll be lifting again. It is very encouraging, though, because I'm lifting weight in sets of 15 that I was only able to lift in sets of 5-8 before I left Portland. I'm also starting to see real muscle definition in my arms and more definition in my legs. As I continue with the lifting I'll slowly replace fat with muscle and should see a very visible difference. The lifting isn't going to make me shrink, necessarily, but it will definitely help get my percent body fat down.

Over the past couple of weeks I've been trying calorie counting for the first time in my life. I've decided that I hate it and it doesn't work for me. Maybe for someone that has a regular schedule and does the same amount of exercise daily it would work. I lift a couple of times a week, do one race pace workout, try to do at least one long ride, and who knows what else I'll throw in there. That means my daily caloric needs can vary by 2000kcal or more. I'm just not willing to put in the effort to keep track of that kind of thing. What I discovered is that I kept underestimating how much I should eat throughout the day and would either eat a lot at night or wake up starving, or both. Overall, I think I actually gained a couple of pounds in the past two weeks. So I'm going to stop listening to the part of my brain that buys into media hype and go back to Neil's diet plan. Eat healthy food whenever I'm hungry and ride as much as possible.

The big sticking point with this plan is making sure that I bring enough food with me to school, especially on lifting days. For example, on Tuesday I brought: a tuna sandwich, a PBJ with banana, an orange, a bag of trail mix, and a muffin. That was supposed to be enough to get me from 7:30am to 4pm with an intense workout in the middle. It didn't work. And when I run out of food at school, the only real options are vending machines and the cookies at the coffee stand. So for tomorrow, which is the same schedule as Tuesday, I will pack: a burrito, a bagel with cream cheese, an orange, a bag of trail mix, two muffins, a nutrigrain bar, and some cookies. We'll see how that goes.