Weekly Summary

"Athletes don't diet and exercise. They eat and train." 

I don't remember where I read this quote. I believe I saw it on Twitter. The first time I read it it made quite an impression on me. It's such a simple idea. Eat clean. Train well. Recover. Repeat. One of the reasons why I have decided to take the next step in eating a lean, clean diet is to try to further this idea that if we eat well, we train well, we recover well, and (we hope) race well. 

Week one of the vegetarian diet wasn't really that different from what I had been eating before. I made a conscious effort to try and keep my sugar intake to a minimum and not go crazy on grains either. On both of those counts I did OK, but I think that there is going to have to be some concession made for the occasional pasta dish (whole wheat pasta or an equivalent). I had a delicious vegetarian sub sandwich on Friday that was packed with avocado, sprouts, tomato, spinach, and black olives but it was served on homemade Italian bread. The bread was delicious but there was a lot of it. (But it was delicious...) I added a new mix of nuts into my daily diet as well, a blend that included walnuts, pistachios, pecans, cashews and almonds. I decided to eliminate my previous trail mix that had included cranberries (that had been soaked in sugar) and plentiful helping of small squares of chocolate. I am still leaning on eggs and whey as my primary source of protein as I try to figure out how best to approach the protein/amino acid issue. So I guess I would say, all in all, it's off to a good start. 

The ultimate question though is how did it affect my training. This was a recovery week for me, meaning lower mileage (albeit with a couple of higher intensity runs on Tuesday and Thursday). I only ran 43 miles total but I felt very good every time out. I am not sure yet how much of an impact the diet has had or is having because becoming a vegetarian really is not much of a change. It's really more just a "tweak" to some things I was already doing with an effort to eliminate some things I had come to regard as staples that could be better. 

With that in mind, I am going to continue this little project up to my next race, the Kapt'n Karl's 60k near Austin at the end of the month. The only change is that I am going to add fresh fish into my diet once or twice per week. The benefits of fish oil in the diet are well-documented and I would rather consume it in its proper form than in supplement form. Other than that, it'll be straight veg. I'll likely have a couple of high mileage weeks ahead that will offer me a chance to continue to expand my vegetarian horizons and test the theory that fruit and veg-intensive diets promote muscle recovery and are, by nature, anti-inflammatory. I'll continue to try to keep the grains and sugars to a minimum and stay away from processed carbohydrates altogether. 

On a side note (pun intended) I took a couple of hard falls on a trail run last weekend with a friend of mine. I left a good deal of the skin from of my right leg on the trail. After my last fall, a particularly hard crash (I was not having a good day), I apparently did a bang-up job on the ribs on my right side. I've been fighting a good deal of pain in that area all week. It did not affect my running but I was not able to get any strength or core work in because of the pain. I'll stay off the technical trails for another week or so just to make sure everything is healed before the next race - just a few weeks away!

6-28-14!