Kim and I began the morning with a run/walk around the lake. We're pushing the distances she runs each workout now. We run the first mile at a decent pace, then walk a bit (up a hill), then run some more, recover a bit, then run the rest of the way back home. She shaved a minute off of her fastest time! After the cardio Kim was off to work for a bit while I hit the spin bike for 30 minutes. After the bike I had a meal or two and then headed to they gym for 3 more miles of running and then a leg workout. The running was easy. I varied my pace between 6 & 7 mph for the 30 minutes. After the treadmill I stretched briefly and then was ready to train legs. 3 sets of leg extensions, 3 sets of leg presses, and 3 sets of true squats for quads. Hams began with 3 sets of heavy straight leg dead lifts, then 3 sets of seated leg curls, and finally 3 sets of weighted hyper-extensions. Not a terribly grueling workout compared to what I did a few months ago, but I wasn't running 6+ miles a day then either.
So I had a good training day, and I ate good too, until after dinner. I was trying to stay awake long enough to watch the Braves game (they're on the West Coast, so the games don't start until after 10PM) and I got hungry late. I had a few snacks and justified eating a bowl of cereal late by deciding to cycle my calories high for the day. I felt I've been doing lots of cardio and training hard, so it would be fine to eat some granola. So I did. I had taken in about 2300 or so calories before the late snacking (that's about what I get per day now) and then added on to that. Oh well. BodyBugg had me burning ~4300 on the day, so a ~3000 calorie day wasn't too bad. Just more than normal. Now I know lots of NS folks will see this number of calories per day and freak out. It's OK. When I was eating just NS my normal calorie intake was 1500-1800 per day. At the time I was training 30 minutes per day during my workout, and doing no more than 30 minutes of walking up hill (which by the way is a great cardiovascular workout). Now I average no less than 90 minutes of cardio per day, plus my workouts. I'm purposely adding the calories so I don't, you know, die.
I've noticed something with my workouts over the last two weeks. I'm regaining lots of my lost strength. I may have mentioned this before. It's more evident each workout now. I think a return to high protein meals has helped a lot. Doing all of the cardio & being in overall better shape helps as well I'm sure. But I train immediately after running usually. I should be weaker from exhaustion. Each workout I'm moving closer (slowly, mind you) to the weights and reps I was training with previous to beginning the diet. Hope the strength continues to return.
I've mentioned previously all of the running I'm doing now is in preparation for a 5K run which has different obstacles you have to navigate, called "Warrior Dash". It's all for fun, each contestant gets a Warrior Helmet, you can wear costumes, and there are multiple prizes awarded for best costume, best warrior scream, best warrior beard, etc. So with that in mind I'm still growing my Warrior Beard. It's about 5 weeks old now. I haven't shaved since before we went to Costa Rica & Kim accidentally unpacked my razor in the car on the way to the airport. So the pic below is me, about 1/2 way into the Warrior Beard growth. The beard goes away on May 24th, the day after the race. The pic below the Bearded Warrior is a star trail image I shot while waiting on the Braves game to start. I was trying not to eat the bowl of granola. I failed. Anyway, the photo is a composite of about 100 images, stacked to show the illusion of the stars spinning (it's actually the Earth spinning) over our house.
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