It seemed so promising...

The week that wasn't.  A week ago I felt that I was back. I felt mostly recovered from IMWI. I felt I had the motivation, and I had my whole season mapped out. I was ready to make my return to more formal training. 

Well, that didn't happen.  Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday went great. I was running, I biked with my powermeter again, I even swam, and for bonus points, went to a yoga class at the gym.  My eating was right on track, nice and clean, no cravings, felt healthy.  The scale was being nice to me.  The whole big dreams for the 2014 season seemed to be giving me a good push in the right direction. 

This was very similar to how much of my training this past season went. I'd seem on a roll, like I was back in my old groove, and then it would fall apart again.  Three to four days seems to be the limit.  I have been looking at the cycle and this is my hypothesis.

Day 1: Feeling good. Rested. Yay for healthy food. Love this sport!
Day 2: Look at me, two days in a row. I'm making sure to get the workouts in, but life stress might be starting to climb up just below my conscious level.
Day 3: Uh oh, lots to do with work, cleaning, studying, etc.  Stay up late. Don't want to miss tomorrows workout, so still wake up early.
Day 4: Ah, wonderful, 5 hrs of sleep. I can do this. Possible struggle through a morning workout, possibly just use the early morning time to do other things, since I tell myself I will feel more like working out later.  But then I am tired and stressed. I eat crap. And when I say crap, I mean ice cream for breakfast, finished off by handfuls of chocolate chips. Then I'm on the sugar roller coaster and binge all day, with barely any real food. Of course I feel too nasty to workout, so I skip and feel guilty. But the sugar keeps me up too late, so the cycle continues tomorrow. 

Yes, bad eating, as said before is derailing my workouts.  But I think the root cause is lack of sleep, and the root cause of that (yes I am not using "root" correctly) is stress and chaos in everyday life. 

So once again, this is a new week.  I'm not going to make goals about hitting every workout or being perfect with my eating (though both would be lovely. Kinda like when you say on your first marathon you don't have a time goal, but man, are you chasing down 4 hrs). Instead, my one goal is to get 8 hrs of sleep a night. This will be an n=1 experiment. My hypothesis (aren't I a good scientist) is that I won't have the food cravings. I will feel more in control. I will want to workout. I will be a better me.