Pre-work out and Me: No sleep for the idiotic

Two things you need to know before we begin:

1)      I’ve never had pre-workout before.

2)      I workout during my lunch break at work

A lot of my friends and acquaintances and people I stalk on the internet are fitness fanatics.

These healthy, happy people who always seem to have better lives than me are always touting the benefits of some supplement or recently discovered rain forest dwelling grass-berry hybrid. One thing however that I am constantly being told both by my internet stalkees and their real life counterparts is that if you’re not using pre-workout you’re not “getting the most out of your workout”. To translate out of gym niceties: “You’re an embarrassment to the gym and yourself. Why do you even bother, you sloth on a moving walkway?”

So when it came time for my 20^th or so “diet and exercise starts tomorrow” declaration for the year so far, I decided to purchase one of these wonder powders. This was less a well thought out and researched procurement than it was one of these products being in my direct line of sight and costing under $30 at Chemist Warehouse.

Since I work out almost exclusively during my lunch break (home time is internet time) it dawned on me that I was going to have to take my new energiser work with me. This I did.

I had been told by many people (who I now realise were embellishing the truth to some degree) that pre-workout was basically rocket fuel for people. It would give me an unparalleled burst of energy which I would then parlay into becoming a workout monster when presented with a treadmill and/or dumbbell. Gullible as I am I thought “Wow, better halve the dose so people at work don’t think I’m on crack.”

So Monday before work I zip lock bagged up a half dose of my pre-workout miracle powder and off I went.

As lunch rolled around I decided I better mix up this stuff of legends as the container suggested drinking it an hour to an hour and a half before your workout. “Cool. No problem. Everybody does it right? How bad can it be if all those fitness people take it. So you’ve never tried it before and you are in your place of employment, it’ll be fine it was $29.95 from the chemist. You didn’t buy it from a guy wearing a trench coat in the middle of summer.”

…………………………..When it comes to new things I am, as a rule, an absolute wussy. So I halved my half dose.

I pulled out my suspicious looking baggie of white powder and tried to discreetly distribute it into a shaker bottle at my desk. The majority of it ended up on and in my computer keyboard. But I managed to get some in the shaker and enthusiastically added water and shook it above my head in a defensive display of “I didn't bring cocaine to work! See?! I’m just really into fitness!”

For the next hour I sat at my desk, placebo effect in full swing. If I typed an especially fast sentence in an email, my brain immediately suspected I was under the influence of the pre-work out and it was enhancing my already absurdly quick and particularly inaccurate typing skills.

I decided I’d better head off to the gym so I could reap the benefits of the best investment under $30 I’d ever made (Except for maybe 45 pairs of Kmart socks).

As I stepped triumphantly through the front doors of the gym, my energy evaporated instantly. It was like someone decided to flick my lazy switch into the ‘on’ position. Evidently the placebo effect was not strong enough to carry me through an actual workout. So I spent 30 minutes on the cross trainer at a very low resistance reading a book.

Far be it from me to give up on this thing I had spent my hard earned cash on and that was supposedly the best energy booster ever to grace the earth, I decided that the next day I would take a full dose of this crap. No, not a full dose as recommended on the container, a full dose in the eyes of me, which out of stubbornness was a whole scoop of powder (note: recommended dose is half a scoop).

Again, suspicious baggy on desk, but this time I dumped the whole lot in the shaker, careful not to coat my keyboard a second time. I downed the liquid as quickly as I could, which is not very fast. (For some reason I am a terribly slow drinker who gets full really fast. As a kid..and possibly still now..it would take me all day to drink half a juice box.)

I again noticed my typing speed seemed to have accelerated to Flash like levels, but wrote this off as more placebo effects induced by the concoctions tropical flavoured lies.

 I trotted off to the gym anyway. This time, however, I practically flew there. I burst in through the front door and wove through the few people in my way like Pacman avoiding Blinky…although somewhat less agile. I went straight for the treadmill and cranked that shit up to 11. (I literally put the speed on 11. I know that’s not crazy fast, but I felt like Roadrunner at the time). I zoned out listening to a mismatched playlist of Britney Spears’s ‘Toxic’ and ‘The Plot to Bomb the Panhandle’ by A Day to Remember on repeat, and watching my reflections pony tail bounce exultantly from side to side with each lightning fast step that I took. I finished my 5ks in a less than impressive time, and with less than impressive pains in my legs, but it felt like a victory to me. I had survived the pre-workout! It had given me the energy to run to a Britney Spears song!

Whilst showering and feeling on the edge of exhaustion, I thought back over my intake for the day. Got up, had coffee. Met a friend for dinner, had coffee. Got to work, had a can of energy drink. Needed a break from my computer screen, got coffee. Almost lunch time, had pre-workout.

Andddd so I added up just how much caffeine I had actually had prior to my ‘pre-workout is awesome’ epiphany run.

Too much.

Enough that it may have caused me a crazed burst of cartoon bird enthusiasm for running short-moderate distances on a flat surface at a controlled speed, (What type of bird is Roadrunner anyway?...Google says Roadrunner is a roadrunner. Huh. Well there you have it.)

Had I jumped the gun too soon praising pre-workout as my motivational savior? Was it in fact glorious caffeine which had kick started my ability to run Terminator T1000 style towards a car that I never reached (this is what I imagined while running to keep me motivated, which is why I kept my palms open and focused greatly on arm swinging technique).

I didn’t really care. I was that tired that putting my pants on after the shower was enough effort to almost make me break out into a sweat again. Dear god I’m unfit.

I am home now, and have been for the past 4 hours. I should have been asleep 3 hours ago, but am not in the least bit drowsy despite the (minor) physical exertion I put myself through today. The lesson is probably that no matter how much of an addict you think you are, you CAN have too much caffeine, and will suffer the consequences of sitting up in bed when you should be asleep, writing terrible blogs about how you can’t sleep. It will help you run fast briefly, but then you will be trapped in an endless thought cycle, trying to decide which caffeinated beverage it was which inevitably pushed you over the edge. 

Caffeine + Caffeine + Bubbly Caffeine + Caffeine + Tropical flavoured Caffeine = Energy/Brain malfunction + a thousand word essay on caffeine.

So for now I guess I will continue the pre-workout regime. Largely because I don’t want to waste almost $30 I could have spent on regular coffee, and partly because I don’t really care if I never sleep again.

That last part is not true. I would like to be able to sleep now please. My left eye has started twitching.