Accountability

So this year my big goal is to do well at XTerra World Championships.  For those that don’t know the course—it is basically a series of hill repeats on both the bike and the run.  They pack in 3000+ ft climbing in 18 miles on the bike and 1500 ft in 6 miles of the run.  So the key to this race is power/weight ratio.  I like to think that I do fairly well on the power side of the equation—which does me well on flatter courses.  I am also not that tall so I am pretty compact for the windy courses.  My forte is definitely flat, windy courses (I also get blown around less than the smaller women in the wind, another advantage).  So, what business do I have targeting the exact opposite of what I am naturally good at?  What we love and what we are naturally good at don’t always line up.  So here I go.

The first easy thing to do on the weight side of the equation is to throw money at it.  I’ve been riding a dual suspension, fairly long travel mountain bike for the past few years.  For Christmas Santa Clause (Don) brought me a nice new 29er hardtail that is going to save me a good 5 lbs once we finish swapping out a few components and put race wheels on it.

Now the hard part and what this post is really about—actually getting to race weight.  I always seem to be able to get within about 5 lbs of what I consider my optimal race weight.  That 5 lbs is probably the difference between standing on the podium and not.  How to make it happen?  Enter the coach, Chris Bagg.  On one of our recent calls:  “Hey, your weight is staying the same, how about we do food logging for the next couple of weeks so the I can see where we might need to make some adjustments”  So, to make it as painless as possible, I got the app for my phone (My Fitness Pal) and started logging my food.  The sneaky thing is—you can hook it to your Training Peaks account—so not only do I get to see what I am eating every day—my coach also gets to see it.  After 2 weeks of logging, he has not suggested any changes in my diet.  The very fact that I am logging it and he can see it is causing me to make smarter choices and the scales are going in the right direction.

I actually know exactly what I need to eat to get to where I want to be.  So why don’t I do it?  Why can’t we be accountable enough to ourselves to not need the added step of a coach looking over our shoulder?  I don’t actually know the answer to that question or I would have been successful in the past.  Since I don’t know the answer I am going to go with it and pause every time I go to eat something and think:  What will Chris think when he reads this in my log?  I still have a way’s to go—I’ve actually now gotten rid of the off-season weight and will be moving towards those last 5 lbs.  I hope I can be successful with this extra measure of accountability we have added.  #cbcg #WeAreEvolution #EndureandEnjoy