Thursday, March 5, 2009

To much spare time???

trimmed back training has given me way to much free time to think about things. Yes this is a very bad thing when it comes to me. One of the things going through my mind was how many calories do I burn in the day in the life of me. So I wore my heartrate monitor for 24 hours. Come on you have all wanted to do it.

I should have worn it on a complete rest day but with the short base ride yesterday it was still going to give me a basic idea. I found it pretty cool to see that I burned 877 calories while I slept and had an average heartrate of 58 bpm. For the day I burned roughly 2400 calories in day to day stuff but add another 900 in that 1.5 hour ride.

Calories are important to know but there are good calories and bad calories. I do eat pretty good but do have a weakness for potato chips. Oh and beer, must make room for beer, I'm hydrating, honest. So most of my intake is pretty good.

Where am I going with this?? This is all about my training partner. The Molly Monster. The last few days I noticed her energy was down. We did do the long ski on Sunday, about 30 kms. She is 5 and a half now but still. Of course having a calm dog for a change is always a great thing.


Now the second thing I noticed was that she wasn't eating all her food. She just ignored her dinner last night. Ok something is wrong. Wait I've seen this before a few years back. I went into the basement and looked under the stairs. Looking closely I saw the cause of a the tired puppy.

Cat food. In the dogs eye's sweet, tasty, dry food. Cat food to dog's is on par to us trying to live on ice cream. It tastes ohhh so good and it will give you a little bit of energy but when you crash. Well there are to many good descriptions but I'll keep that open to your imagination. She ate at least a pound of dry food. It was indoor lazy cat food but still.

Well like any drug addict, help is always close. Unfortunately they don't have the Betty Ford Clinic for animals so in Molly's case the next best thing is exercise. This worked well with me also. Heather had me scheduled for an active recovery ride. With mild weather again today to stay on the trainer would be a crime.

To keep the pace sane I grabbed the single speed and headed toward Port Severn by way of side roads. The Molly Monster was in chase. For those that are about to say this is mean. Molly has run 50 km in 3.5 hours leading the whole time. Yes she can move.

She found her rhythm after about 15 minutes. For me it was a mellow ride with the main idea of keeping my heartrate under 130. Just enough to get the blood flowing.

We still have lots of snow but with the weekend's weather I'm really hoping to see some dirty soon. I know March is still early but I can hope.


How I feel about winter now.

Slimer has been moved from the helmet to his new full time ride. The Blue XC Carbon singlespeed. seems to like it there. I still have one slimer on a helmet. You will still see the glow in the dark slimer at 24 hour events.

We were out for an hour and a half and Molly was back to her normal strung out self and tore into dinner. She is now doing her next favorite thing. The couch.

That's it for now.

1 comment:

F.W. Adams said...

Funny, I've been kinda of sluggish and slow lately, too--and I've been eating cat food! ;o)

Okay, no to the cat food and the symptoms are easily explained by a combo of viral issues and laziness!