Autumn sobriety!!! 

Welcome to the very first addition of the CAL-FIT blog!

By the end of a very social and busy summer I had decided it was time to put the beer and wine back on the shelf. July was an action packed month as I had been in Verbier Switzerland visiting my mate Kingey and competing in my big summer ultra trail race the Trail Verbier-St Bernard X-Traversée 76km with 5600 D+. After completing such events it’s natural to take some down time as your body needs to take some time to recover both mentally and physically. 

After 10-12 days of being completely off I started strength training again along with running trails again, nothing too extreme as it’s important to gently ease my body back into training to begin with. At the end of July I had another trip, this time to Lagos on the Algarve to see two of my mates Jordan and Henners who were visiting from the UK. This trip was purely social though, there was no ultra trail marathon for me to use as an excuse for beer consumption this time round! 

Now we are at the start of August and it’s the height of summer where we live in Cascais, Portugal. When we first moved to Cascais  we found out about Hashing which is a drinking club with a running problem ( their self description of hashing) I thought this sounded great! Basically you follow a trail which is between 10k-14 long marked by blobs of flour in the nearest national park, for us it’s the Sintra-Cascais national park. At the end of the hash everyone congregates in a circle and takes the piss out on one another while downing cans of Super Bock (not a paid ad) Most people are taking the beer consumption far more seriously than the running aspect of the event. 

The hashes are held once every two weeks, and it just so happened the first one in August coincided with my birthday so this made for a relatively well lubricated weekend to say the least. I just want to add though as a trainer my rule of thumb is Mon- Fri is dry and then enjoy the weekend with moderation.

At the back end of August my wife and I had another trip, this time to Cáceres just over the border in the Spanish region of Extremadura. Now between everything else going on, I had been working and training hard, so was looking forward to this trip. Generally when I visit a new place I like to get out and go have a run as it’s a great way to get your bearings.  Now the problem here was it was 38-40 degrees by 11 in the morning and 42/43 in the afternoon. Just to be clear I love running but fuck running in that heat on vaction, no thank you. Luckily the Spanish had an answer to my  heat problems in the way of these lovely little cañas of Mahou beer. These were rather quaffable in the hot Spanish sun and definitely gave a great account of themselves, best on ground for sure! In this region of Spain they still  give a free tapa with every drink, a beer on average was 1:70 euro so for less than ten euros you could get well fed and watered. 

After five days of  enjoying everything Cáceres had to offer, it was back to work and training in Cascais, it would be fair to say I probably wasn’t feeling the  sharpest on my feet after my little Spanish venture #beerswswollen! Anyway the weekend came around and I was sat by the water at Monte Estoril having a not so impressive Sagres larger, it was at this point I knew I was fucking done. For myself a beer or a glass of wine or cocktail is something that I’ve worked hard for during the week, like a reward or treat. Whether it’s right or wrong is a different story, but that’s the way I operate.  Anyway I found myself drinking this beer thinking this doesn’t even taste nice compared to the superior spanish beers. This may piss off my many Portuguese readers to hear but that’s my opinion, deal with it! I was simply just drinking it because it was the weekend. So that day, which was the 27th of August I decided  would be my last day of drinking for just shy of four months roughly. The next time a drop of alcohol would pass my lips will be the 20th of December, which is the day before my wife and I go on our Christmas vacay to see her family in Latvia. 

Ok, so what did I want to achieve from the upcoming months of the Sahara desert dry season? The problem with most events being in the summer is that it’s the social season too. There’s weddings to attend, people visiting, trips to go on etc. Basically there’s a lot more distractions and makes for a much more difficult race preparation. Coming into the autumn through to xmas I find it a bit easier to keep my head down as the weather is a bit cooler and people are generally back into a normal work routine. 

I’m also really interested to see how the body reacts to this experiment physiologically too, like seeing if my VO2 max will increase, effects on body weight, recovery time from training and overnight resting heart rate, lactate threshold. 

So at the start of the experiment I was 84-86 kg, had a VO2 max score of 54 and an average overnight resting heart rate of 39 bpm and I’m 180cm in height. So this data isn’t terrible but there is some room for improvement for sure!

Normally I find the first two weeks the most challenging when saying goodbye to alcohol but surprisingly this time I had no such problems. What I first noticed after the first week or so was that my cravings for sugar went through the roof. I don’t really have much of a sweet tooth normally, I’m very much a savory guy. Anyway my wife baked two trays of chocolate chip cookies over the weekend, Monday came around and I was home alone for the week. She was on a work trip to Brussels, come Monday evening I had the biggest cravings for these cookies and proceeded to pound the fuck out of these little bad boys to the core of the earth. Now I wasn’t consuming the beer and wine on the weekends my body was like “Hey where’s my sugar mate? What’s going on here?!” 

So what’s really happening is our brain is searching for the feel good chemical dopamine, this is released when we intake both alcohol and sugar. Over the weekend the brain would normally get this from alcohol consumed, now that’s not happening my body was still seeking the dopamine hit, hence me wanting to pound the fuck out the cookies. After about the first month of no alcohol these cravings balanced out back to normal, that first week though those cravings for sugar were bloody intense. 

This was the only real negative in the first couple of weeks, everything else was pretty good. Weekends are much more productive, training is much more enjoyable for sure. Although I don’t suffer terrible hangovers, going out Friday definitely impacts how I feel on a Saturday and my training. When it comes to training I tell myself something is better than nothing when  feeling unmotivated, this is true somewhat but nothing beats getting those quality sessions in when feeling fresh. This is for sure one of the major benefits , second is the quality of sleep when going alcohol free. As we know sleep is very important for growth and recovery. Alcohol doesn’t really benefit us there as the quality of our sleep is affected poorly if we have been out the night before.  To be honest though the first two weekends I experienced poor sleep according to my Garmin device. Was this  my body having a kind of placebo hangover? Still the quality of the training was much better than before. 

So now at the time of writing this I’m just over half way through autumnal cleanse, what changes have I seen? So my body weight is around 80-82 kg, my VO2 max score increased up to 55, and my average overnight resting heart rate is 37 bmp. So it’s fair to say according to the health data things have gotten better for sure. This is all well and good but at the end of day the most important thing is how you feel. It’s very easy in this day and age to become slaves to data with more people having Garmins, Fitbits, Apple watches and WHOOP etc.

Just because we have positive or negative data from a device it shouldn’t determine our performance in our next event, whether that’s a football match, crossfit games or an ultra marathon. These things come down to different variables like commitment to training, desire and attitude, staying healthy and injury free. 

What I can say is I definitely feel healthier and fitter compared to when I first started this experiment, I don’t need a health device to tell me that. 

I’ve got one race which is ultra trail event in Proença-a-Nova at the end year on 9/12 and it will be really interesting  to see what the effects of three plus months of no alcohol will have.

 Now it’s time to ramp up the training in these last seven weeks and before I know it’ll be time for a frosty Christmas beverage! 

Alcohol free beers never, 

H2O forever 

Beers soon!