It's been a long time since I updated my blog! Times were rough and I lost my mojo.
I was bummed that I hadn't consistently lost weight in the 2 years at Weight Watchers. I did really well the first 6 months I was there, got to my 5% goal and then was about 4 pounds away from my 10% goal and then my weight crept back up to it's original spot in the 240's over the next year and a half, seems I like to sit in the 240's for some reason.
I've always felt that my body needed extreme amounts of exercise to create the burn to continue loosing weight consistently. To others that amount of exercise may seem like easy peasy, but to me if felt like I always had to be "on": always moving, always tracking food, always thinking about strategies to get more movement in etc etc and all that seemed overwhelming and exhausting not to mention always feeling various sore muscles and being constantly tired. It's just easier to lay on the couch... right?
Well in my last post in November 2012 I mention buying a weight bench and mapping out a bodybuilding plan and just needing to clean out a spare room to make room for said endeavor. Didn't happen until last week. I put the pro in procrastinate! What prompted me to do this big change seemingly out of the blue? It wasn't exactly out of the blue, but let me give you a bit of background.
In January, after the holiday eat-extravaganza was done and my weight was back up to 246 and 250 was looming on the horizon, I was talking with some friends about needing some mojo. My friend Vicky brought up the Princess Half Marathon in Disney saying that she wants to run it and thought that if we started training in February 2013, we should be ready for the race in February 2014. We decided that the Princess run could be our new lofty goal and that we could indeed train for it within a year. We also decided to start doing video logs every Sunday (or so time permitting) to discuss our progress, our mountains, our molehills etc etc. Those recordings are still being edited and I'll post the link to our joint website sometime in early June (we hope).
So thus began a new round of seemingly lofty ambitions and goals. Apparently I decided to pull up my big girl panties and just get er done. Monday February 18th I decided that I would begin a running program where I would get up at 4am every morning and run before work (Monday to Friday). I slowly built up the distance as the weeks went by. I think I started with 2km per day and added 0.5km per day the following week, then another 0.5km the next week... to the point where by the last week of March I was running 4km each morning. I couldn't believe at that point that I was still doing it. It felt good, I was feeling tired, exhausted and sore, but I also kept thinking about the 10km race in May, how I wanted to do better than last year, but even more so I was thinking about the pacing requirements for the Princess Run: 9.32 min /km!!!
Nose to the grindstone, keep working is the motto. The first Sunday in April (7th) I started adding a longer slower run like most 10km or 1/2 marathon schedules have in their repertoire. I ran 5km on the 7th and I ran 6km last Sunday. This Sunday is 7km. Should make it to 10km by the beginning of May, just in time for the 10km race.
So while all this awesome running is going on, I'm not really loosing much weight, but I figure it'll come off eventually.... right? Well I went up a bit two weeks in a row, got bummed out and was going to eat a skid full of chips and decided it was probably muscle gain. I googled and everything I read said that it was probably water retention because of muscle gain/strain and that at the beginning of any ambitious program it can and will probably happen. I took out my measuring tape and low and behold, several inches smaller than my last measurement session.
Chip skid disaster avoided... let's forge on! Also in my research it was recommended to incorporate body building and core exercises to support the back... yeah my back really hurt, not lower back, but the top of the ribs type of pain. So hence the re-org of the spare room and the assemblage of the bench happened on April 13th.
This past week I've run my 4km each morning with a rest day on Wednesday so I can run the long run on Sunday PLUS I've done body building on Monday/Wednesday and Core work on Tuesday/Thursday. The weight is melting off more in this week than in the last 7 weeks. Is it the body building? Is it the extra attention to diet? Is it just my body finally getting the metabolism ramped up to the right amount? WHO CARES!!! Either way it's great and I hope that the 4am run thing someday becomes an ingrained habit because at this point, it's well past the 21 days of habit mythology and it's still tough, but so very worth it!!
