Flying that Veggie Flag

To make it crystal clear – I’ve transitioned most of my diet to a vegetarian diet (with the exception of fish when I go out). As most of us know, there is more going on in the background to most decisions people make, so let’s take a step back for a little bit of context before we dive into the vegetarian thing.

I recently came off quite the intense year. My new wife (Sara) and I were working through our first year of marriage, my job was tougher than usual (seems like par for the course sometimes), and I was more focused on multisport than I ever had been in year’s prior.

While knowing that my work/expectations/effort load had been higher than it had ever been before, I still wanted to excel everywhere – didn’t really matter to me how busy I was, I thought that each of those areas of life were things important enough to say “mediocrity here isn’t okay“. So Sara and I worked really hard to make that happen. As a result, I was able to land a promotion at my job, top off my triathlon season with a qualifier to Worlds 70.3 in New Zealand and a 3rd place finish at Chicago Tri, and find a really good groove with Sara as to how we live our new life. All in 2019!

Accomplishing all of that is cause for celebration! We did – We really did celebrate our accomplishments in that. However, with the year of 2019 closing out and turning towards 2020, I had to wonder “What didn’t I accomplish in 2019 that I need to tie off in 2020?” The biggest nagging thought I had was “I want to break the tape”. That also seems to serve as a good answer too – so I’m going with it. It isn’t any secret that I really wanted or really tried hard to win the Chicago Tri in 2019, and I am not disappointed that I didn’t. However, the next race I do and every race I pursue will be an effort to get a little closer to that big intimidating goal of “breaking the tape”.

Now we’re almost up to speed.

I had just completed my first build cycle of the 2020 season (yeah that training starts in November for me), and stumbled upon the documentary “Game-Changers” on Netflix. While I watched with a skeptical view, as they poured on the supporting evidence for their viewpoint, I thought to myself:

“I honestly can’t tell what’s exaggerated and what’s not, but given the type of improvements being talked about I need to give this a try and see for myself.”

Yeah, I watched a documentary and got sucked up into a food trend – And what of it? I can tell you that I feel much better, I have A LOT more energy (like the only time I crash is bedtime), and the idea of cooked meat is actually a little bit gross now. Sure there are some negatives that I need to address with the diet switch, however, it had been mostly a positive experience.

I recently finished my second build cycle on 12/22 which consists of 3 weeks of a training regimen that hits between 9-11 hours of a mixture of training each week. I noted the positives above, but as for the negatives; I lost 5lbs (down to 140 from 145) which is a little unusual for me and I felt like it was a little harder to recover from day to day – however, that could’ve been the nature of the uptick in training.

What I am going for here is making a change to help accomplish that intimidating goal of 2020. Who knows if this is the change that I make to make it happen or it is something else? What I can say is that so far the experiment has been successful, and with a few tweaks everything will balance out well for the upcoming build cycles. I’m pumped to see how this can affect my performance in the long run.

That brings us today. (EDIT)

Now, I wrote everything prior to this over Christmas week. I’m still on this diet and I’m not sure I really want to go back. The energy and life improvements are just too big to ignore. For those of you that want to explore the type of benefits from not eating or heavily decreasing your meat intake, I would encourage you to try it. I would be happy to chat further about how I made the switch as well as give some further context about my experience thus far!

Got any questions/comments? Let me know below!