Weekly Wrap. Week 7.

Hope you are doing well and have noticed that days are getting longer and longer. That of course depends, whether you live in northern hemisphere, like myself and are exposed to the “winter time”. But in general, every week adds about 30 minutes to a day now: mornings start earlier and not as dark, while evenings are getting darker much later than before. That is a very welcome change of events and is sort of a sneak peak of Spring coming bit by bit. Of course, with weekly wrap of week 7, we are almost at the end of February and getting through the “winter in our calendars”.

The older I get, the less I like Winters as a season. In general, I became much more warm temperature appreciating person, rather than negative degrees. It also means that I will need to dress less for my runs and going to the swimming pool in the morning will not be a unpleasant as before. Nevertheless, Winter season does not usually leave Lithuania without a good kick on the thermometers and it is no difference this year. It is predicted that next two weeks, temperature will drop down below 15 negative Celsius and some nights even below 20. Luckily for myself and Dovile – we have a trip planned far away from these kind of “bamboozles” and inconveniences – we will be visiting, what I think is my favourite place in Europe, Canary Islands. Specifically we are going to Gran Canaria this very Friday for a vacation week and afterwards, a training camp awaits me in Lanzarote. All in all, it means that upcoming two weeks will be full of sunshine, vitamin D, great weather, warmth and well deserved rest with my wife. I am very looking forward to that.

Quick Note on the previous post.

It came to my attention that my previous blogpost “Shorty” did not get published correctly and based on my reading/viewing statistics – a lot of you have not received any notifications about it. Therefore I will be re-publishing it alongside with this post, so you might be getting it twice or if you have read it previously – feel free to skip it. My apologies if this causes any inconvenience to you.

Training Camp.

Trip to Lanzarote was planned and expected since September 2017, I believe, when my coach approached his trainees and suggested to come to a camp that he has been running for the past 5-6 years I believe. This is going to be my first ever training camp. Our current itinerary is to do some good training and work for the 6 days, training usually twice a day, some days up to 4-5 hours per day. I am extremely excited for it and I already am thinking about how I will have so many exciting things to talk about and write up some posts. This will be a good build up time for my upcoming races as well. Especially, when I have recently received a notification from Ironman 70.3 Mallorca – that the race is due in 12 weeks. Which, realistically speaking, is much closer than it seems. All in all, I am very excited about the trip and holidays and here is a glimpse of the itinerary that my coach has built up for the upcoming week in Lanzarote:

Current maximalist in me tries to already think how I will be able to utilize some time, when there are no additional sessions planned (Saturday / Tuesday after bike and Wednesday), by training additionally – but the realist in me tries to convince that that is not going to happen. Only time will tell, but excitement is building up much faster, than time passes towards the camp.

Broken promises and sweet dreams.

After last week’s short and intensive illness/flu – I still am not sure what it was, however, I am happy that it passed away as unexpectedly, as it came in, I briefly struggled to put my mind to the regime it was in before. Just two days off sport and it was so difficult to make myself come back. For a few sessions it defiinitely felt, as if I can not be bothered to train or that I need more rest, or even sometimes if I should push this hard. Dovile helped me to understand myself and my body, mentioning that it is most likely normal for the body to not be super excited for another training session just ouf ot the illness, however short it was. I admitted that sounded like bullet-proof reasoning and complied with it. Retrospectively, I am grateful that it did not take long for me to get back on my feet and start training again. Despite me sitting right now with sore leg muscles from top to bottom, I am happier than I would be, if I did not have those sore legs. It would have a negative impact on my morale, if before the trip and training camp, I needed to take a full stop and step back and not train. So once again – I am very happy how the things turned out.

Difficulty was underlying in another place though. When stepping into February, I promised myself that I will ease off on the sweets, eat healthier and remove alcohol from the equations. With all that mentioned and promised, I did everything completely opposite. It might be the volume of work I have been having, the household remodeling which took time and effort, as well as general tiredness that drove me to it. With February at its end and a lot of calories from sugars and foods I was not supposed to eat – I came to rest with the inability to adhere to my plans. Reasoning would fall on the things I have mentioned above, they are not the best of course and could be delt with, but summing them all up – it is difficult and requires a lot of psychological effort to control. That effort, unfortunately is spendable and during February, it seemed it was spent elsewhere. Which ended up in me going berserk on all the foods and liquids I inhaled.

The indirect stress endured throughout the travels, work tasks, additional juggling of training sessions, illness out of nowhere – it all combined itself into undesired behaviour on my behalf. I will try to be fixing this in March, let me have this last week of lead time of last few days in February. With that in mind, hopefully with March on my doorstep, my psyche will be much more prepared to control the cravings and fake needs for sweets. If that works out well, I will gladly share my insights here. For now – the only guiding light I follow, is that I am far from a professional athlete and my mind requires some slacking, and sometimes – I just do that, I let it slip and cut it some slack.

100 years.

And just a quick note of a massive thing. Last week, on February 16th, Lithuania has celebrated its 100th year of freedom as a country. Me and Dovile were invited by our friends to got to the cinemas and a cozy celebration after with some tradional lithuanian drinks, food and music. One of really pleasant and great evenings to have and not miss out. The movie, which was released to commemorate it is called “Peledu Kalnas”. It losely would translate to something like “Owl’s Hill” and was the best movie done in Lithuania I have ever seen. It recreated the fight lithuanians were taking against Soviet Union in 1950-ies to regain their freedom and their tries to notify the rest of the world about the horrible things soviets were doing in Lithuania. I think that the movie has done it very classy and realistically. I have felt such sense and level of immersion, only from top notch movies previously. All in all, it was a great cause, a great group of friends to be with and a great evening to spend. Thank you Juste and Darko for hosting, Kristina for the tickets and Paulius for all the facts and music. As Kristina mentioned – if this becomes a tradition, I will be very happy to stand behind such a tradition

Random

Song of the week: Sinickis – Vilnius
Reading: Stephen Hawking – A Brief History of Time
Game: Assassin’s Creed: Origins (PS4) / Starcraft 2 (PC)
Average Weight: About 78.2 kg

Stephen Hawking’s book is one of the most difficult books, I have read since studying philosophy at the university. However, it is one of the most exciting ones. Together with “Cosmos” and “Big Bang Theory”, I have grown such a great interest into theoretical physics and cosmology in general. Sometimes it is difficult to crunch the words behind it, but it paints the picture very well and makes me think how much more there is outside of my own life around. A sort of transcendenting experience. Of course, my experience with the book could be summarized by this excellent dialogue from Fallout 3, but nethertheless, I enjoy it:

As always, thank you for stopping by and hope you enjoyed it. If you have anything to mention – do not forget to share it in the comment section below.

❤