Success! For the the first time in a long time I’ve managed to not put on weight over the Christmas holidays.

We decided to drive to Jacqui’s Mum’s in South Golden Beach, 20mins north of Byron, so, since we had the car, I opted to bring my bike. The goal wasn’t to continue training and riding five days per week, it was merely to get a few longer rides in over the two weeks we’d be away in order to offset the extra eating.

I had hoped to do 3 rides at Denise’s and a further two when we went up to Buderim to stay with Nath, but in the end I only managed 2 at Denise’s and 1 up at Nath’s. Still, it was enough to keep the weight off, and as a result I start this year at 85kg instead of 89-90kg.

I have a solid week of cycling coming up as the club heads to Adelaide to watch the Tour Down Under. The result will be close to 700km of hilly cycling and a few more kilos shed. If I get my shit together I might finally crack the 80kg barrier this year!

Well after the last post, the recommencement of training didn’t last very long. July went reasonably well, but August was a disaster. Three weeks of almost constant rain made it pretty hard to get out on the bike, and for some reason I managed to stack on all the usual winter weight that I had managed to avoid for the previous three months!

September started quietly from a training perspective with an excellent holiday to Uluru, followed soon after by my brother’s first ever visit from Ireland, and by late in the month my CTL (Chronic Training Load, which basically measures fitness) was down at 22 (which is almost untrained) and my weight was back up to 89-90kg. On the plus side, Spring had spring and the weather was getting a lot better, so it was time to get moving again.

Being that unfit meant it was a slow start, as interval type training would take too much out of me, so the first two weeks involved just getting out on the bike and putting in the hours.

My initial plan had been to do four-week blocks - three weeks solid training and one easier recovery week - but two weeks in it became obvious that doing three solid weeks back-to-back was going to be too much, so I’ve switched to three-week blocks - 2.5 solid weeks with half a week recovery.

Here’s the last month’s workload and things are ticking along nicely now. The three-week blocks work well, as just when I’m getting really tired at the end of the second week I can convince myself that it’s only a few days until I can take a few days break. Each of the solid weeks works out to 4 hard rides and two easier rides, and if I’m really tired I have the option of skipping the easy rides. Most of the time you actually recover better if you actually do the really easy ride rather than doing nothing. My CTL is now pushing 60, which would class me as semi-fit (based on my personal scale).

What also became apparent as I got back into exercise is that I tend to eat too many carbs. Despite riding 9-10hrs/week during the first block, my weight barely shifted at all! I was eating pretty healthily 90% of the time, but was still prone to snacking in the evening despite eating a decent sized dinner.

I’ve tried super-low-carb Atkins before and had good results on it, but wasn’t keen to go that extreme again, so instead I opted switch my focus away from carbs onto protein & fat. All it boiled down to was making sure I got about 120-150g of protein per day, then eat plenty of good fats like avocado, olive oil, fish etc. and then add carbs on top depending on how much training I was doing. Instead of carbs being 55% of my intake, they dropped to 25-30% and fats went in the opposite direction. Result: 89kg at mid-October, 84.8kg this morning, less than a month later. Riding 250-300km a week obviously helps shift the weight, but from previous experience, if I’d stayed on a mainly-carb diet I’d probably still be around 86.5-87kg at this stage.

Good to finally be making some progress again!

As mentioned previously, I’ve entered La Marmotte and have engaged a coach to train me for the event. While I’m confident that he knows what he’s talking about and will be well capable of designing a programme to prepare me for the event, there are two other obstacles to success.

The first is my inherent laziness. Family and swimmers who trained with me will remember my lack of discipline when it came to training. Sure, I trained, but rarely as much as I should have, and if it wasn’t for the fact that my sister was more dedicated than I, I’d have remained in bed a lot more often when the 4:45am alarm went off. Still, that’s my cross to bear and I can only resolve to force myself out of bed in the morning as required.

The second problem is my weight, or more specifically the surplus of it. The advantage gained by extra weight travelling downhill is more than wiped out by the disadvantage of carrying said extra weight uphill, so in an event with 5000m of climbing, being 89.5kg is a distinct handicap. In September I was weighing in at 93.4kg and the commencement of cycling training, combined with a mini-diet, got me down to 88.3kg by November as which point I stopped the mini diet. The idea was to see if I could maintain the new lower weight for a while before making another step down. Christmas was the big hurdle, but I think I did OK to limit the weight gain to about a kilo.

Anyway, the scales tell me I consist of 20.5% body fat, leaving my non-fat body weighing 71.2kg. If I could get to 10% BF I’d then be down to 78.3kg or a 13% weight loss. That should help my climbing be something less than glacial! The plan at this stage is to do nothing until I’ve completed the MAP test, as the results are useless if I’m tired or lacking energy for the test, then to reactivate the mini-diet in stages to get to my goal weight. However, if I’m losing weight anyway as a result of following the training program, there’ll be no need for the mini-diet. Time will tell.