The Flipside: What Happens When An Endurance Athlete Goes Anaerobic

I've been tired lately. Like really tired. Go to bed at 10:00 tired. Take a nap in the car while my daughter is in her riding lessons tired. Tired like training for the Ironman tired. At first I thought maybe it's this Paleo eating thing, I remember the last time I felt really bonked out from the lack of carbs for the first couple of weeks. But that should've passed by now.So I took a look at my exercise/food/sleep journal to try to tease out what the problem is.

Oh. Yeah. There it is. I added up my hours for the last few weeks. 10+ hours of karate a week. Plus an assorted 3 - 5 of running and swimming. Yeah, that makes 13 - 15 hours a week of training, or about what I averaged for the longer weeks of my Ironman cycle. On top of that, it's flipped from what my training was for the last few years, where my endurance workouts made up the bulk of my training, with a bit of sprints, hills, and anaerobic stuff thrown on top. Now most of my training is anaerobic with just a smidge of endurance and boy does that anaerobic stuff kick your booty. Today I went to three karate classes. In each one we did several sets of 50 punches in a squat position, alternating with sets of kicks. That was the warm up.. By the third class, I was taking bets whether my arms would fall off before my legs collapsed beneath me, or vice versa.

Couple that with the fact that I've largely been doing trail running instead of street running (my favorite trail run gains 1000 ft in the first mile alone) and that means that even my "easy run" days are a lot harder than they used to be.

So if I'm not up late posting here on my blog anymore, you know why - I've collapsed beneath my down comforter and I'm sawing logs. Or more likely dreaming of kata.