Week 3 –

Call me a dork, but I’m a big fan of logs.

Training logs, food logs, catalogues, sleep logs, sawing logs… math logs, not so much though…

There are so, so, so many things that affect your performance. Day to day, sleep takes up the most time, but isn’t typically viewed and monitored as critically as training or nutrition.

Sleep can be a great indicator of how much stress your body and mind are under. Keeping track of your sleep habits (time to bed, time in bed, natural wake time, initial waking feeling) can provide a lot of insight to your state of fatigue.

I’ve found my sleep to be well correlated to training load – if I’m stretching the limit on a training block, sleep suffers; as if my body is trying to give me more reasons to stop stressing it. And the other way too, if I’m under-loaded, I just don’t sleep through the night – my body rests as needed and is cued to go.

Making time to sleep, and to sleep well can make a huge difference in both high performance and day-to-day life.

I think it’s difficult to take sleep “seriously” because sleeping is such a passive activity. Sawing logs though, love it.

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Louis Laps – 21 August 2016

By the end of the summer 2016 I was riding pretty regularly. It was nice to have different modalities to mix in to the running and roller-skiing base miles. This was just a Z1 ride I did with my Dad on one of his favourite routes from our old house in Midhurst – out to Mount Saint Louis, up-and-down-and-around a couple times, then back home. Endurance ride, except for when we were racing up some of the hills ; )

I’ll link to the Strava if you want to see the ride and connect there! But here’s the general recap and workout comment.

Time – 3:04:29
Distance – 84.9km
Heart Rate Min/Avg/Max – 67/124/184

Legs feeling a little rough, zapped from intensity yesterday. They got better as the ride went on and I actually had some good dig and spunk on the climbing efforts we did. Coming home was a bit of a slog with a big headwind. Good ride though, nice to get out with Dad again. Mom rode with us for the first hour before turning off too.

https://www.strava.com/activities/684138868/

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The majority of the workouts here will be more structured intensity or strength based, but most of the training I do are endurance workouts, so it’s inevitable that some show up here. I’m thinking that down the road I’ll have some guest-workouts from teammates, just for a different angle and for interest.

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