I'm no longer poisoning my body with pesticides/antibiotics and my digestive system seems to be functioning with reasonable efficiency once again. I am able to train at an early-summer level of intensity. I do not have a home that is being foreclosed on, nor do I have money vanishing in the black hole that our stock market appears to be. And my bank hasn't closed yet either.
Yep, life is good.
So I finished my prescription of Flagyl, which killed the Giardia along with a huge amount of good cells that would have been nice to hang on to. As the medicine left my bloodsteam, I started to resemble a human once again and a little later even started to resemble an athlete. A 10 pound lighter athlete, but still an athlete. I had to start back into training very slowly. I mean really slowly. I was basically going for walks, sometimes with rollerskis on my feet, sometimes connected to my bike, sometimes just plain walking. I started with an hour and over the course of two weeks built up to 2.5 hours and a couple of days with two workouts.
This past week has been like a normal training week in June. Modest hours and a couple of interval workouts, I also rode my bike for 4 hours on Wednesday. Things seem to be coming back together though I am still not recovering as quickly as I would like.
The bottom line is that I am just not in very good shape right now, relatively speaking. Thats how it is. Some of the people around me have been trying to convince me that I'm not out of shape, Im just a little off. Thats not the case right now. I'm just not in good shape. Period.
I've always been a proponent of being honest with oneself as an athlete. If you don't address weaknesses you can't fix them. The only way I'm going to get back to top form is the old fashion way, through hard work. There is no way around it.
In terms of a timeframe, I'm definitely aiming further down the road this season than in those past. I'm hoping to feel prepared by January and be in top form by February. Its going to be a fairly thin race schedule for me this year, focusing on few very but important races. One thing I am definitely looking forward to is training more on snow in December and January than I have in some time. I really do love to ski and it will nice to have the time to actually do it in the early winter.
For now its back to the basics. I'm still trying to gain back some of the weight that I lost. I am getting really hungry during workouts right now and that needs to stop. Once I can hit the high hours and long workouts again, I might look to move towards some more speed based training.
The more relaxed pace of my training lately has given me the opportunity to bring my camera along. Here is a bit of what I've been seeing in PC:
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