Things learned

I feel I need to make this extra entry to summarize what I have learned yesterday.

First of all, I need to correct my distance estimates. I measured the distance today with the truck and it is exactly 7.0 miles from our garage to the office parking lot. Since I don't walk to the parking lot and I took a shortcut at one time (cut across a switchback winding up on a bridge), I cut off another .4 miles from that. So, the errata:

1. I really just walked 6.6 miles each way
   
2. for a total of 13.2 miles
   
3. at combined time of 3:16 hours
   
4. resulting in an average speed of 4.04 mph.
   

Which is much closer to what I thought I can sustain.

Now for the other things I have learned yesterday.

1. Learn to listen to what your body tells you, stupid.
I came home last night, ate a bowl of split pea soup (very good) and then my mind landed on the icecream in the freezer. The little devil in my mind can justify just about anything and it just made perfect sense that since I did a pretty heavy workout, I can have icecream now. Right? That train of thought totally shuts up the little angel (who I think is the real voice of my body) telling me: "Hey, think about this for a minute". So, to totally drown the poor little angel, I had a slice of blueberry cheesecake, topped it with icecream and topped that with a shot of rum. And felt pretty good about it.

I woke up in the morning with a slight headache. I normally get headaches only when I get dehydrated or drunk. Searching for the cause of this problem I reiterated what I did last night and that's when it hit me. The sequence of events:

1. I get exhausted walking
2. I eat some body building blocks (peas, meat)
3. I eat a load of sugar
4. I have a shot of strong alcohol
5. I am a dumb ass, I should have stopped at step 2 and go to hottub instead. I can just hear the little angel grinning from ear to ear while he whispers: "Would this be a good time to say: 'I told you so'?".

To explain the logic of the above. Sugar and fat are just about pure energy with no other nutritional values. I think that eating sugar before or during the exercise is probably OK if I really have to have it because it will burn (well, unless I eat a pound of candy). Since the exercise normally just rips and damages my muscles, it's probably a good thing to help your body to rebuild right after it. Proteins appear to be pretty well suited to help with the job, sugars and fats are totally useless, they just get stored as the excess fat I am trying to get rid of in the first place. I am not a nutritionist, so I may be totally wrong, but the above logic seems to make intuitive sense. So, basically, I have worked my ass off first and then totally negated the effect of it.

I am severely disappointed in my lack of brains, especially after I was so confident last night, and told my friend about, of how I am learning to listen to my body and we're getting to be pretty comfortable with each other. Well, as one of my moments of Zen on my wall says: "Good judgment comes from bad experience, and a lot of that comes from bad judgment". So,

2. Don't beat yourself up over it and learn from your mistakes
sounds like a pretty reasonable thing to do now. My nutritional guidelines have been permanently altered to

1. Think first
2. If you want to have sweets, do it right before workout
3. Workout
4. Do not eat sugar and fat right after workout
5. Do not drink alcohol right after workout - in addition of it being just pure source of energy, it also diminishes my mental capacities, so there is a heightened danger of eating stupid right after I drink rum. Pretty obvious.

3. After you learned what your body told you, follow it through.
Learning to hear is different from understanding the words, which is different from using my judgment and doing the right thing. I have to be right on all three counts. Seems like the first step is to learn the voice of the little white angel. It should not be too difficult, normally he makes a perfect sense although I may need to think about it a bit.