Where did these muscles come from?!

Ouch!!  It hurts to walk.  My poor body!  After only two workouts with a personal trainer this is what I get?  Ow, where did these muscles come from?  I have not been sore like this for quite some time.  Getting out of my car a few minutes ago was comical.  I winced.  The trainer just laughed when I expressed my pain.   He said "ha ha, it's only going to get worse, just wait!" He sounded almost excited at the prospect.  I just stared at him.  I'm a little afraid, got to admit.

I am a bit of a fitness freak.  I love to work out and test my body's limits.  But my workouts for the last 8 months have been in the pool, on my bike, or on the running trail.  I competed in several triathlons this summer (including two half Ironman distance races) and am currently training for a 100 mile bike race and a half marathon.  I honestly have to force myself to take a rest day once a week.  For the longer races I would put in an average of 20 hours a week training.

I think of myself as being in pretty decent shape.

Until I walked into Andre's House of Pain, that is.  I have not trained anaerobically in quite some time.  Andre had me going non-stop from one instrument of torment to the next for over an hour.  My heart rate was up and I was sweating, which surprised me!   I was not doing cardio.  What gives?

After the torture session,  I wrote Andre a check, and signed up with him to train me.  (Apparently I enjoy pain.)  He gleefully predicted my future and said that in 2013 I was going to tear up the triathlon courses!  Well, that sounds awesome, but in the meantime I predict I'm in for a lot of work.  And pain.  No pain, no gain right?  Yikes.

We then talked nutrition.  Until today I fancied myself a nutrition expert.  I am an athlete for crying out loud.  Well Andre' took that notion and squashed it like a bug.  Apparently I don't know much about anything related to nutrition.  Whole wheat?  No.  Sodium?  No.  What are the ingredients to good nutrition?  Well, I'm quite sure that if I share his secrets I might be in for added torture, so I'll just say that everything I was doing was wrong.  Low sugar, fat free....No.  I am supposed to use....gasp....real butter?!  (Yes, I am one of "those people" who says "no butter please" when I order my egg white omelette.)  Which reminds me, I'm to eat the whole egg.  Low-fat salad dressing?  No.  Use real salad dressing just less of it.  After he explained the thought process behind his recommended nutrition guidelines it kind of made sense to me.  That's not to say it will be easy.  I am a creature of habit, and as I'm learning (and have said before) old habits are hard to break.

So I'm left with this......change everything.  Well, not completely everything, I will still swim, bike, run (or I'll go mad).  But I'm going to work on my other muscles too.  The ones that have been hiding.  He's hoping to strengthen and make me smaller, leaner.  My goal is to lose 12 lbs.  Yay!  I take that to mean I'll be faster, of course.  Nutrition is going to be the game changer, so that will mean a mindset shift for it to work.  So, while I'm not eating cookies, cake, pie, candy or flour (or anything processed), I will be eating butter and full-on-fat salad dressing.   And I'm told ice cream (the real stuff) is allowed.

So if you need me, I'll be nursing my pain with some Haagen-Daaz.  See you soon.