March 24, 2014

Month 8 on the quest for 5.13a (yeah…moving though these hard grades takes time) feels like forever now. I have heard that one benefit of taking time off from climbing *from an injury* is renewed motivation. After nearly a month off of climbing (for me, Jake) I have just that. Generally speaking, I’m always pretty motivated when working out; 8/10 workouts I’m rip-roaring and ready to go! Note – Jilly has not taken off from climbing and has been crushing it the last 2 months – climbing harder than she ever has before and better than 90% of the men in our gym.

Last week I was driving Jill a little crazy when I said, “I want to finally see if I can become a ‘serious athlete’ and for the next 6 weeks I’d like to buckle down and train ridiculously hard before our next trip.” To which she replied, “What are you talking about? All we do is train; we eat, sleep, never see our friends because all we do is train. 4-5 days per week we are in the gym for over 3 hours at a time.”

She was of course…correct. She then pointed out that I only didn’t feel like I was trying hard because I wasn’t currently climbing, which is usually 75% of our/my workout regime. My finger is still not 100%, so all I can do now is keep taping it for support as best I can, and keep climbing day after day until the pain goes away. Sadly, that’s the best I can hope for with this type of injury.

The Schedule

If we didn’t have to have jobs and stay on a schedule then it would be easy to do 2-days-on and 1-day-off training cycles. But, we aren’t pro-athletes; no one pays us to spend all of our waking time working out hard, so we have to work real jobs to supplement. 🙂

In truth, our schedule for the past 7 months has been pretty regular. 3 or 4 days per week focusing on endurance, power, and supplementing with core and cardio where possible. The significant change will be adding even more conditioning *anything not climbing*. The main reason for this is to prevent injury and build mental strength, and to burn off any excess energy since we will be climbing slightly less, though higher intensity.

We will no longer be bouldering as part of our routine, other than for warm-ups; its great for power building and has a huge benefit, but it is also the cause of the finger injury that I am currently suffering through and have been suffering since I started bouldering over the years. It is such a high-intensity activity, and SO EASY to hurt yourself (tweaking muscles, pulling tendons, etc), and really isn’t paramount for our goals. This will also give me more time to build endurance and project some routes until we can climb outside again!

We have also added an additional rest day, mostly for recovery. A bit over-simplified for quick explanation but overall the plan is very simple. All of this adds up to ~20 hours per week of training.

Sunday: Full Rest Day

Monday: Warm up, Endurance climbing aprox 10 routes (2x back-to-back, no rest) from 5.11a-5.11d, cool down, stretch.

Tuesday: Warm up, Endurance climbing aprox 10 routes from 5.10a-5.10d (2x back-to-back, no rest), high intensity interval training 30 mins, core work 30 mins, cool down stretch.

Wednesday: Full Rest Day

Thursday: Peak Performance Day: Warm-up, 3-5 attempts/routes 5.12d-5.13a/b, high intensity interval training 30 mins, core work 30 mins, cool down stretch

Friday: Full Rest Day, with massage every other week (for Jake only).

Saturday: Hardest Day, Peak Performance Day: Warm-up, as many attempts/routes 5.12d-5.13a/b as we can do in 2 hours, intensity interval training 30 mins, core work 30 mins, followed by 30 or so mins of Bouldering/hard routes with whatever we have left.

Nutrition

In addition to climbing, we also have revamped motivation for eating…well I guess we’ve always been motivated eaters! What I mean is that we have been eating even more healthy than before…you can check out the “New Frontiers” post for rhyme and reasons to this.

Honestly, we have and continue to eat more healthy than probably 95% of the planet already. But for the past 2 months, Jilly has been experimenting with this new whole-foods, plant-based (vegan-like) diet. I completely resisted this for nearly a month, because I was sure that while the facts were laid out in front of me, that it wouldn’t work for me. But very soon after this began, I realized a lot of things were changing for me as well, and for the better. Since my animal protein intake has been drastically reduced to less than 5% (almost nothing) of my caloric/food intake, I have seemingly no end to my energy levels. I feel less tired than I used to – and not just working out, but normal life as well; I am more alert and also feel lighter overall; not just weight-wise, but inside I feel great and much better than I did when I was consuming more than 50% animal protein in my diet.

While we are attempting this new way of eating, I do still continue to eat a few things here and there like seafood, eggs and some pork (though very infrequent). Its a slow process to shift a lifetime’s worth of belief and love in meat to one that constitutes no meat or animal products, but it has been more enlightening than I could have expected. We have also gotten back into shakes and smoothies full of yummy things like fruit, vegetables, protein, whole grains and lots of goodness! Jilly will be posting some of our favorite recipes in an upcoming blog post.

Let me also state that it doesn’t hurt that Jilly is a pretty amazing chef and can cook meals that you would NEVER know aren’t packed full of animal protein. There are a lot of magical ingredients out there to convince even the most adamant of omnivores out there that they just ate a heaping mound of delicious meaty goodness. Plus having a chef-wife who is also super creative, she has devised some fantastic dishes I didn’t even know were possible. We’ve already faked several of our friends (well Jilly has) with our cooking!

The final straw to this…no alcohol.. We’ve removed alcohol from our diet; not that we drank much before; but now its down to just about nothing. Once in a very long while we will both indulge in a rumble juice or share a delicious micro brewed beer, but otherwise we don’t drink anything. When summer comes around, I’m sure we will indulge a bit more because sometimes there’s nothing better than a cold brew on a hot day after being out in the sun climbing or camping…

So all-in-all we have a lot of great new things happening with our nearly year-long attempt at full on training. Its been a pretty steady ride and a great distraction for us in the winter, though we are both aching to get out and play in nature when the weather cooperates. Sailing season is almost upon us again, which will be another supplement to our overall training goals and fitness levels.

Stay tuned for an update on our Seattle Lover’s Getaway – Jilly is working on editing all the video content from that trip, which will be posted along w/ tons of photos!