Sleeping like a RockStar
Sleep does great things for athletes. It enables us to recover and perform better, makes us less prone to injury, and makes us mentally sharp for our daily tasks. But sleep and I have never been on the same side of the bed. I could go to bed at 8pm or 2am and I will still wake up at 6:30am. I’m a natural early riser and must get to bed early to have any chance of logging some hours of mattress time. The problem is that most of my hours spent in bed are a half sleep where I drift in and out of consciousness. On days that my alarm is set for 5:45, I wake up at 5:43.
Trying to go back to sleep after I wake is a waste of time. The day has started! On the very few occasions that I have managed to sleep until 8am I wake up and think to myself, “Shit, the day is half over.”
If there was a WOD – sleeping for time – I would DESTROY it. My time would probably be better than my Fran time, well, maybe not, but you get the point.
With all that said, it has come to my attention that, since starting the Paleo Challenge, I sleep. I sleep straight through the night and on Saturday – I SLEPT FOR 12 HOURS STRAIGHT. I’m not sure that has ever happened – honestly. I’m also dreaming – vivid dreams that I remember details of after I wake up. I’m sleeping in a deep sleep. This morning I woke up confused as to where I was, what day it was, and why Pink’s So What was blaring in my ear (it’s my alarm song).
I’m still drinking coffee (one cup a day) so it’s not the absence of caffeine. I’m training the same schedule as always w/ CrossFit 3 on 1 off supplemented with CrossFit Endurance workouts.
Could legumes and dairy really have that much affect on my sleep??!! I’ll go sleep on it.
Read More800 Pounds of Rubber
Unfortunately I’m not referring to bumpers, but stall mats, in the title of this post. While bumpers stacked high across the back of our garage would provide a tremendous amount of Oly eye candy – matting our garage space came as a priority.
We got our mats from Stockyards Ranch Supply. All 8 fit into the back of Eric’s 4Runner although the guy at Stockyards questioned Eric as to why he didn’t have a pick-up truck, which is understandable given the normal use for stall mats.
We drafted a plan for the installation pattern of the mats on paper using the dimensions of the garage and mats to get an exact plan. We made sure to stagger our seams for a tighter fit by alternating the start of each new row with either a full or trimmed mat. We swapped out one mat for a piece of ply wood cut to the same dimensions of the mat. This would be our lifting platform.
Cutting the mats was kind of a pain, a WOD for your wrists. We used the CrossFit Journal Sept 2002 issue for instructions on how to lay the mats. We found that putting a 2×4 underneith the mat after the first cut helped to expose and pull apart the cut line. After the second pass, we added another 2×4 to expose the crevice. Three passes with an exacto knife split the mats.
Here are the before and after pictures of the mat project.
Eric shop vacuuming the garage before we laid the mats.
Matted Garage
The Two Week Dance
Two weeks down/two weeks to go. I’m feeling great and haven’t had ANY blips in the program.
Performance, energy, and mood was great over the past week. Weighed myself for the first time in two weeks and I haven’t gained or lost a pound which I find odd for the following reasons:
1. Over the past two weeks I ate 13 oz. of almond butter (mostly straight from the jar with a spoon)
2. I haven’t weighed or measured my food (as I did when I was on the Zone)
3. I am leaner
4. I ate whenever and whatever (all Paleo), and any quantity of food I felt like for the past two weeks, sometimes to the point where I was stuffed and questioned what the hell was wrong with me.
Tonight’s dinner was another great meal, Chicken Korma, from Cooking for Health and Performance finished off with some baked brussels sprouts, my favorite.
199.5 Square Feet
We recently made the decision to convert our one car garage into a training facility. With 199.5 square feet to work with we will have to utilize every square inch.
Our first task was to clean out the garage. This is what we started with:
Actually, this was after a few hours had gone by, but you get the idea, we had a lot of crap in our garage. Most of it went to Good Will, the city recycler, or the dump, but some of it weaseled its way back into our house.
Total time to clean out garage: 3 hours
Read MoreChow Time
As promised, here is a video of chow time.
When we started the dogs out on raw food we weened them from kibble and introduced, over a one week period, raw meat. In the beginning, we cooked bone-in chicken pieces half way through and then stripped the meat from the bones. We did this initially because dogs shouldn’t eat cooked chicken bones. Now that we feed them raw meat, we leave the meat on the bone.
If you decide to start your dog on a raw food diet and your dog is a food hound, I recommend feeding them by hand for the first few times they get a raw bone. Do this to teach the dog to bite into a chew the bone. One of our dogs tried to swallow the bone whole the first time she got a chicken leg. She is not very intelligent.
Read MoreHunger Graph
As mentioned in an earlier post, I started the Paleo Challenge last week and kept a log on paper. I posted some of my first week’s log entries to this blog.
It’s now been 11 days since I started the Paleo Challenge. The first few days were difficult. The cravings were not horrendous but my body felt lethargic despite the fact that I was eating almond butter in large quantities from the jar with a spoon. As a side note, growing up, my mother used to send my brother and I out the door to school with peanut butter on a spoon. No, it wasn’t Paleo, but she had is right knowing her kids needed fat rather than Pop Tarts for a good day at school!
When I did the Zone, despite my consistent adherence to my block prescription and increasingly multiplied fat blocks, I continued to be hungry all the time, or om, obsessed with food. This did not change much with what I ate or what I was doing in the hours between meals. Don’t get me wrong, I’m still a big fan of the Zone and think my eventual end point will be a Paleo/Zone eating style, but for now, I’m focusing on Paleo only.
As part of my log I kept track of the number of hours until I experienced hunger. I know, I know – there is little scientific basis for this graph. You’re thinking, “Come on Nicole, there are a TON of factors that you have not accounted for in this graph.” Fine, I will agree with that. But it’s still interesting to look at! Check out the increase in hours until hungry beginning at Day 5! I’m going to create another graph for the last week of my Paleo month and compare.
Spaghetti Squash with Meatballs and Marinara
I was never a big pasta fan even before my gluten intolerance developed, but I love this meal. Shockingly, I’ve made it for years and it fit into the Paleo Challenge perfectly!
Check it out in the Recipes section.
Read MorePaleo for Dogs
One of the leading factors in my pathway to Paleo was reading the CF Journal from November 2003 which contained an article titled “Dog Food: Carnivore or Cornivore?” The article profiles Athena, the CrossFit mascot who eats a well-balanced diet of raw chicken legs, fish oil, and a little grass.
“Take any dog food manufacturer’s claimed caloric requirements for a dog and place an amount of naturally available biomass equivalent to that load of sixty to seventy percent carbohydrate and place it on a tarp. Now find a dog that will eat that much grass and vegetation. It would take a goat.
The premise of a dog requiring a high carbohydrate diet is patently absurd. the industrialization of food has produced faire that neither man nor dog should eat.” - CF Journal, November 2003
This resonated with me. My dogs were active and happy, yet hyper, but overall pudgy dogs. I didn’t overfeed them. I fed them almost HALF of what was recommended on the back of their food bag for their body weights. But every year they went to the vet having gained a pound or two. Sound similar to some human experiences?
I looked into their food’s nutritional breakdown and discovered that their food was 48.67% carbohydrate!! And just 22.56% protein!! A brief internet search for a breakdown of the diet of wild dogs or wolves turned up this great article:
“Because of the various canine features discussed above, it is logical to conclude that the diet of the dog should be closely linked to the diet of wild canines like the wolf. This gives us a strong foundation for how to feed our own dogs. According to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, the Timber Wolf (the dog’s closest living relative) diet is comprised of 55% white-tailed deer, 16% beavers, 10% snowshoe hares, 19% rodents and other small mammals. The wolf and the wild dog ingest almost the entire carcass of the prey they catch. This means that there is a small amount of pre-digested vegetation eaten when the stomach (tripe) of an herbivore is eaten.
Your dog can be fed in the exact same way. ” Source: Evolutionary Nutrition for the Dog, written by Sarah Griffiths
That was enough information for me. I was also curious to see if the diet would cause them to lean out, change behavior (all that stored up insulin has to have an affect on them somehow!), or improve their terrible breath. So off we went on a Paleo Challenge for the dogs.
Solstice is a moody but loyal 7 year old mutt whose personality and physical appearance most resembles that of an Australian Shepherd. She enjoys obsessive compulsive sessions with any tennis ball in site, chasing small children that move too fast, and eating at a snail’s pace. Her records indicate she has gained twelve (TWELVE!?!) pounds since she was 1.5 years old despite maintaining an active lifestyle and extremely consistent amounts of food intake. Weigh-in: 61 pounds.
Emmy is a ditzy but loyal goofball. A golden retriever of five years old she enjoys squiggling around on her back, wondering when her next meal will take place, monitoring any action in the kitchen, and snoring even when she is awake. Her records indicate that she has gained 6 pounds since 1.5 years of age. Weigh-in: 59 pounds.
Here they are at their first Paleo meal. Obviously excited.
Day 4
Cruised through day four…
7:30 – breakfast, 1 grapefruit, 1 avocado, 3oz. Turkey
coffee, lots of water
11:00 – hungry
1:00 – spaghetti squash w/ marinara, beef meatballs, 20ish almonds
4:00 – 2 oz chicken, 1 apricot dried, 3 spoons of salsa, ½ avocado, 1 spoonful directly into mouth of almond butter
7:00 – 5 oz. Chicken and beef, ½ C broccoli, 1 C marinara, ½ avocado,
9:00 – 1 grapefruit, fish oil
The 300 Club
While it is probably too early to say the two are correlated, I PR’ed my deadlift today on the same day that I PR’ed a CrossFit Endurance workout. Paleo influence? Maaaaaaaaybe.
7:30 – ½ avocado, 3 oz. Chicken, 12ish almonds, 1 grapefruit
7:44 – feel very awake and with it
10:15 – hunger pain
coffee, water (20 oz.)
12:00 – lunch – chicken breast 3 oz., 12ish almonds, 1 pear, 1 avocado
CFE – 6×400 meters on 2 min rest, PR’ed my average
4:00 – 2 carbs sweet potatoes with coconut butter, 2 oz. Turkey
5:00 – ½ apple with a little almond butter
WOD – 10-5-5-3-3-1-1-1 deadlift, PR deadlift, 300pounds!
8:00 – spaghetti squash w/ marinara and beef meatballs, and 12ish almonds
9:00 – very satisfied, not hungry, ate fish oil and some almonds
