I am sill running. After training up for and completing a marathon, I thought I might be done.
I’m not.
I got back on my bike, part for the exercise, and partly because it’s summer and that’s always a nice time to ride. That has been awesome. My knees are showing their age, and the running is getting harder, but still I can get on the bike and get in an easy 45 minutes by taking the “long way” to work. And the two mix well together — I can ride to work in the morning, and run home in the evening.
And then, last week, I got back in the pool. I did one kilometer on Tuesday, and 1.5 on Wednesday. It made a whole new set of muscles sore. If my fall was going to include regular access to a pool, I’d probably keep swimming on the agenda.
All this exercise, though, is wearing me out. I’d start my week off hard, but by Wednesday or Thursday I’d be pooped — plenty of muscle strength left, bu no energy. Last week, I managed to get in to see an Army nutritionist. Low and behold, for starters, I am coming up about 1000 calories short on a lot of days. My diet is fine — if I were overweight and sedentary, which I am not. She thinks I need about 4000 calories a day, and that I need to be loading up much more on proteins, especially right after I exercise. She gave me the green light for things like walnuts, which are insanely high in calories but loaded with good fats (almost 800 calories for one cup!).
We talked about blood pressure (mine is good these days). More than anything, I’d like to stop taking medication for it; the Army answer seems to slap meds onto everything, and really, I’d rather not. So she gave me some ideas on where to go from here to make that happens. I think it’s possible.
She also directed me to two websites. FitDay is an online journal — I guess that’s the word. Plug in your basic data, add in what you consume, and add in your exercising. It has a decent database of foods, and you can modify the food data to meet what you’re actually consuming. To help fill in the gaps, for, say, a 6″ Subway Turkey Breast sandwich, she pointed me to NutritionData, which is a larger database of food-related data. Yeah, sometimes it means cutting and pasting, but it’s not that bad.
I tinkered with FitDay for two days last week, and yikes, was I surprised. I had no clue that a cup of pecans (which we had, instead of walnuts) had more calories than the footlong steak & cheese sandwhich I got at Subway that day. No clue. I also did not know how much of a difference my exercise was making, with regards to my nutritional needs.
So, I’ll play with it some more this week. I think of it as body hacking. I’d love to get to the point where I can have the energy I want to exercise as much as I want.
