The Wanderer

800 meters swimming in the cold waters of lake michigan, 15 miles biking through the city of Chicago, and a 5k run to end it off. That is the challenge, and we have just 5 months to prepare for it. This is the story of The Sprint.

Hey Friends! I’m starting a new series on the blog. I’ve signed up for a sprint triathlon for the end of August, which will be my biggest challenge to date. As many of you know, I’ve ran a 15k in November of last year, which was difficult and exciting. I think that race unleashed something in me, maybe the confidence to know that I can do something I had never thought I could, maybe the rush of accomplishing a task I’ve dedicated the last 4 months for, or maybe an extreme case of runners high. Ever since that race I’ve been itching for something new, and this triathlon is the perfect challenge.

I’ve been swimming since I was a child, everything from running laps in the local YMCA to crashing into waves at the beach. I have always loved the water, and I’ve always loved to swim. It’s been a long time since my days on the high school swim team, so building up my strength will be a challenge.

Ever since high school I have loved biking. My buddies and I used to bike around the mean streets of Edison New Jersey like we owned the place, and ever since, I have loved biking. I still bike for exercise but it’s been a long time since I’ve seriously biked.

And lastly, over the past few years I’ve been loving running. It’s so cathartic running through your neighborhood, finding little details you missed the times before. That feeling when your heart is pumping and people are flying by, you truly feel alive.

Every week on Sunday I will go through my week, including all the workouts I completed and how I felt with them. I’ll also talk generally about challenges, shortcomings, successes, and everything else life has to offer over the next 5 months.

Week 1

This was the first week of training, and man did it kick my ass. I came into this challenge thinking it might be easy. It was just a sprint race and I already knew that I can do each leg of the race on its own. But as I started training, I realized just how difficult it will be to put them all together.

My split looks something like this: Mondays will be a full body strength day. Tuesday will be Swim and Legs, Wednesday will be Chest and Bike, Thursday will be Back and Run, Friday and Saturday will be yoga and active recovery, and finally, every Sunday I will be doing a combination of either swimming and biking, biking and running, or all 3. As I go through this, I might change up the days, but every week should consist of at least 1 bike, swim, and run, as well as a regular strength training regiment. For example, I liked hitting leg day with a swim after, but going straight into a bike the next day was absolutely brutal. I think potentially separating out my cardio and leg days might be beneficial for recovery. Small changes like that will be iterative.

I made this training program using chat gpt (don’t sleep on it). I asked it to make a training regiment in excel and then changed it up to fit my schedule, fixing any errors it might have made along the way. Then I fixed the format of the excel to work with google calendar and created calendar meetings for each of the workouts. This way every day I can see right away what workouts I have and what’s to come. I am also using an excel spreadsheet to track all of my workouts, meals, and thoughts through a journal entry. A long term goal for me might be to move all of this into an application because I find things like this very useful and the data very motivating.

This was one of the toughest weeks of working out in a while. By Wednesday my legs were immensely sore, and they stayed that way throughout the rest of the week. Doing two workouts a day was difficult in its own right, one of them being cardio just added to the challenge. I lost an average of like 1000 calories a day, every muscle in my body was screaming at me to stop and relax. It was grueling, hard work. But man was this week fun.

I’m a person who generally relies on a routine. While I can function without one, I’d rather have a set routine, a set budget, a set lifestyle that I can build the rest of my life around. The older I get the more I build this routine out. But even someone like me can get stuck.

Lifting in its essence is a goal oriented activity. Every person who comes to the gym has a goal in mind. These goals vary with person to person, some people want to hit a specific lift while others might want to lose weight, the list goes on. But as we get closer and closer to our goals, as we become entrenched in our routine, we begin to plateau.

A couple years ago when I was a sophomore in college I started to work out. I had a little experience with lifting before, but it was never serious. So when my friends asked if I wanted to go to the gym with them, I was nervous, afraid that I was going to embarrass myself in the testosterone filled campus fitness center.

I fell in love with the gym, how fun it was to lift with friends, how great my body felt after, and how accomplished I felt every time I went. It steadily became a routine. Something I would do occasionally with friends soon became something I couldn’t live without. I finally set goals for myself, one of them being bench pressing 135 pounds. I worked hard for that goal, everything from fixing my diet to reading up on the most optimal workouts for growing overall strength. I started following this routine of progressively overloading all of my lifts, a scientifically proven method of weight training that has you add a few pounds to each exercise every few weeks.And when I finally achieved my goal, there was nothing I had felt like it.

But after that it took a while to progress. While training for 135, I saw my lifts increase like crazy, going from 95 one week to 105 the next. It took me something like a month or two to hit my goal, so when I decided to bench 185, I was surprised that 4 or 5 months later I still couldn’t do it.

Good things take time. Great things take longer.

It took me a year to finally hit 185 pounds. And then it took me almost 18 months of giving it everything I had to bench 225. And now, over a year later, I’m still slowly but surely moving up.

The best way to grow is to change.

I have long term goals in my life. These goals, running a marathon, doing a triathlon, maybe even an iron man one day, will take time. A long time. These goals will have many steps, this triathlon being just one of them. And each step will require a change, a new adaptation in my routine that will push me to the next level. And in these processes, I too will adapt.

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So the scene is set, I have a race 5 months out, and for the next 5 months every week I will be bringing you all along with me. I think people enjoy my content because it’s real. I’m not some body builder or marathon runner (though that’s surely coming soon), I’m just a consultant trying to be healthier today than I was tomorrow. I’ll be working, pursuing all my career dreams along this path as well, so I’ll talk about how I balance the seemingly endless workouts, how I find time to train while traveling, and what I eat to give me the energy I need. Along with this, I’ll be doing 75 hard for the next few months to lock me in even further. There’s a lot coming and I need to be in top focus if I’m going to succeed in my goals. So little to no alcohol for the next 2.5 months until the weekend of the Montreal F1 Grand Prix (Expect blogs about that cause I’m SO HYPED). This is going to be a very difficult journey, but you all are motivating me as well. I know this could be educational as well, for people who are just starting out like I am and want resources, so I’ll be linking any spreadsheets I have or any resources I use on these blogs.

Thank you again to everyone who follows the blog and reads my work. I know my posting schedule has been sporadic but this series is a way for me to get back to doing what I love. Here’s to the beginning of a new journey, to one more step forward.