Competition is just over 5 weeks away. We have our flights, rental car, and hotel room booked, and training is going well. I will be competing on Thursday, March 7th in Moose Jaw. This Western Championships will be the largest ever with something like 479 competitors over the course of 4 days. There are always some nerves heading into a competition, and this one will be no different, except that there will be more things to be nervous or stressed about. This will be my first time competing with two platforms going at the same time, so there will be more people in the warm up area, more noise and distraction, and the need to especially pay attention to the announcer. Since this event is far from home, I will be without my coach and it has been some time since I have competed without an experienced, familiar handler. I can try to find someone at the venue to handle me, or my husband can do the job although I will need to tell him what, when, and how to do stuff. Those two details are stressful enough, but right now I am more stressed out about something else.
This will be the latest lifting time I have ever done in competition! My weigh in begins at 3:00PM with lifting beginning at 5:00PM. This is stressful for a couple of reasons. Firstly, this is a major deviation from my normal routine. For half of the week, I am crawling into bed around 6:00PM and, even on the nights I am in bed a little bit later, I am still definitely not in my prime then. I am not used to lifting weights that late in the day, although I will have to fit a later workout in a couple of times between now and then. But the biggest source of stress is the 3 o'clock weigh in.
When I submitted my registration, I selected the weight class I have competed in for the last few years. At that time of registration, I was less than two pounds above that weight class, which I knew wouldn't be a problem to drop for weigh in. Almost immediately after submitting my registration, my weight jumped a couple of pounds and barely budged for the next couple of weeks. It is still close enough that making weight shouldn't be a problem, but the time of weigh in is daunting and precludes cutting that extra weight at the last minute. For this level of competition, if I fail to make weight then I cannot compete! I cannot go all day without eating to ensure I make weight, not if I want to be able to perform at my best. We are going to try dropping enough weight that I have a small buffer of 3-4 pounds. There is the option to change my weight class before February 15th, so that is always a fail-safe option if the scale isn't moving enough over the next two weeks.
And so, my coach has given me a nutrition program of carb cycling based around my training and rest days. Honestly, when I opened the program and began reading through it, I felt overwhelmed, like I was trying to decipher some scientific mathematical formula. Macros and carb cycling I understand as I have been there, done that before; however, my eyes glazed over as I read the notes on when to have a high carb versus a low carb day. It truly isn't that terrifying, but it also isn't as simple as have x carbs, x fats, x protein, and x calories each day. I have two high carb, two low carb, and three medium carb days a week, but where those days fall on the calendar might not look the same each week. For example, a high carb day should be on my hardest training day, if I am training later in the day, or it should be the day before my hardest training day if I am in the gym early in the morning. Also, if I am training later in the day, I should have more of those carbs pre and post workout, but if I am training in the morning then I should backload the carbs to my last two meals the day before. Those are the instructions just for the high carb days! So immediately, I need to sit down with my day-timer to look at when I work, when I will be going to the gym, when I have an appointment that might affect my time table, and then I need to figure out when I will have my low, medium, and high days. The hard work comes next...tracking my macros.
Tracking macros isn't necessarily for everyone. I have had great success with tracking my food, but I have resisted doing so for the past year or so for several reasons. Tracking and staying on track requires a lot of time and effort and discipline. My husband looks at what I do when I am tracking and says he could never do that. I have the sort of personality that can absolutely do this, but the relationship I have with food doesn't always want to do this which is why I stopped tracking. This time around is for a specific purpose and duration, so I know I am capable of sticking with it, but I had a mini crisis yesterday that had me teetering on the edge of scrapping the plan and just going up a weight class. Because of my schedule, routine, and personality, I know that in order to be successful with this plan, I need to plan ahead. Not just a day ahead but like the entire week which is absolutely not something I excel at when it comes to food (and another reason why I stopped tracking). When it comes to food, I can plan ahead all I want, but I'm like the horse that you can lead to water but not make drink. I could plan steak and potatoes for dinner three nights from night, but if I do not feel into eating steak and potatoes when that meal is in front of me, then I won't eat much of it and will end up grazing and snacking on all sorts of things. I can plan to have eggs for breakfast several times a week, even in varying forms, but at some point I will nearly gag as I try to eat them. I cannot eat the same thing on repeat, no matter how much that simplifies meal planning, prep, and tracking!
My little crisis came from spending the entire morning planning out my food and macros for Sunday through Wednesday. Not a joke! Aside from getting up to use the washroom, filling my water bottle, looking in my fridge or freezer for what I had on hand, I wasted 4-5 hours on figuring on what to eat for every meal and snack and making adjustments to portions or changing items entirely to make the macros fit, and I didn't even finish planning the entire week! I do not want to spend half my day sitting in front of a screen playing food math while also trying to figure out what I might feel like eating in the future or when I might start gagging on an easy food staple. Although it has been a while since I last tracked food, this time seemed to be more onerous, and I struggled to believe that the end result would be worth the effort. After church this morning, I sat down to finish planning the rest of the week, but I stopped after finishing Friday. It didn't take terribly long to plan Thursday and Friday, but I can't just sit around all weekend. The biggest thing for me is planning through my work week, because those are the days where I have the least amount of available time and am more likely to eat poorly without a plan. Those days are planned for this week!
I know that weight can and will fluctuate on a daily basis, so I don't get too bothered by the number on the scale, unless I am heading into competition. However, I started tracking my macros four days ago and this morning's scale number was a pleasant surprise. Down 2 pounds since yesterday morning and only about . 3 of a pound over my weight class! It's much too early to feel excited or confident. The scale will go up and down many times, but this is the first significant drop all month and helps me feel like all this tracking effort just might work.
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