I have been breaking a lot of ground in terms of my physical fitness lately. Today I ran an identical race to one I ran last year, except this year I finished the 5k in nearly 8 and a half minutes less this time around. Now I am very very confident that feat can not be duplicated as I was thrilled at my sub 25 minute time, and I can not even imagine a sub 20 minute 5k at this point in time.
As much as I want to say I owe my success to tea, every time I try and start down a road about how my new found physical fitness is linked to tea, I hit a near instant roadblock.
I now drink far less tea than I did a year ago or more. Moreover now a lot of time I could spend drinking tea is spent working out.
I am not saying this has taken away from my enjoyment of tea, in fact it could be an instance of when you get a little less exposure to something it suddenly becomes all the more precious. But could I actually owe part of my physical fitness to the fact that I am now drinking a lot less tea?
Sorry I needed a picture for us to dwell on that question for a bit, because I am going to dare to say the answer is yes. But before I give my answer let me ask a few questions of you to see if I can bring you into my line of thinking before I just go into an answer.
Do you ever have snacks with your tea, or feel the need to have food shortly after tea?
After having a good amount of tea have you ever felt the need to be lethargic, to try and recover from the large amount of caffeine, and other substances in tea?
On an otherwise beautiful day, have you ever spent over 2 hours on marathon tea sessions?
To each of those my answer is a resounding yes. Now to talk about each one a little more detail. Not only do I feel the need to have food with or immediately after strong tea, especially when it is quite far from an otherwise standard meal, healthy options such as banana's, apples, or other fruits and veggies are almost never a satisfactory item to go with tea, or have after tea. Tea being a bit harsh on the stomach, when it causes you to desire food it is almost always fatty, or oily food.
I can not count the number of 3-6 hour marathon afternoons of tea I have had, and this really is a double edge sword. Yes it could be worse, I could be lethargic with a 6 pack of beer, or some other highly caloric beverage and watch TV all afternoon, but that almost makes it worse, if you tell yourself for those 4 hours you are being healthy, it removes the desire to actually be even more healthy by going for a walk, or meeting up with friends to throw around a Frisbee. In fact while the tea is not bad, the best thing it is likely doing is causing repeated trips to the restroom, at least then you are moving. To circle back to the second question, even more so after many of those sessions, there is often a need to recover. It really is a lot of strong tea, and I have had enough bad experiences of going out in public after a large amount of strong tea, and once in public, things are scary, I feel like a tweaked out meth addict (hopefully I didn't look like one).
Again I apologize for this post, but I am not knocking anything about how great tea is, but more attacking the fact that it is not bad for you, so clearly drinking it in excess could not be bad for you either. I also admit there was a lot more going on than just reducing my tea intake to get me to where I am today. If at anything I hope this post sparks an interesting debate about whether this is a case of too much of a good thing can actually be detrimental.
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