In a perfect world, I'd be free to carry out my dietary adjustments in peace. Yesterday was the first day of my planned 5 day juice cleanse. It had to be. The juice is cold pressed, not pasteurized, so it wasn't recommended that it stay out unfrozen for more than a couple of days. Over the course of the day, I realized all the juices basically had the same taste going down, that of lemon and ginger. Those were components of every one of these juices so no surprise. They must have been put in to mask offensive tastes, unless there's some theorized benefit to the lemon/ginger combo. All day I felt fine. My treadmill run felt sluggish. But with the music cranked, I was able to at least belt out three miles.
Last night was tough, though. Jen, I mentioned, has suddenly decided she wants to bake every low calorie, natural treat around. She's latched onto the slow-cooker thing as well. The odors and sights in our kitchen were torture. I made it through. But it was hard.
This morning's run was a bit more difficult. I've experimented with low-carb before and I'd not been looking forward to how this juice cleanse would affect that aspect of things. This is a kit I ordered so the guidelines recommend refraining from all but the lightest exercises. This morning, the effect was a little more pronounced than yesterday. In chilly 21 degree air, I only managed to keep an 11:00 pace for 3.1 miles. Still, "it's for a good cause," I told myself.
After I made my hour-long commute to work, I sensed my first bathroom urge since the cleanse began. Good thing, as I had a planned two-hour each way trip planned for the morning. Only...about 45 minutes into my drive, I felt the urge again. I made it the rest of the way but I fretted the whole time. So I did what I needed to do on my trip, hit the bathroom again, and headed back to my office. About 45 minutes later...another "urge." It then occurred to me that my juice cleanse was going to have to stop. In two days, I have to take a weekend trip involving a 6 hour each way drive. There is no way I want to be seeking out gas station bathrooms every hour on the drive, much less at my destination. Sadly, I admitted defeat and stopped for some fast food, my reasoning being that I needed to get "stopped back up" pretty quick. Sorry for the TMI but this was a detail that caught me completely off guard. I spent hours today thinking I was going to have to pull over and dart into the forest. That's not a great feeling.
So...the juices. I guess I'll revert to Jen's "clean" cooking for now and either freeze the remaining juices through the weekend or just work them in with my regular meals. I can't say how disappointed I am. My weekend trip will probably prevent me from getting in any meaningful runs and I was hoping the fluid loss/fasting effect of the juices might keep inspiring me and that being on a strict juice regimen would keep me from indulging in the obligatory fast foods. Oh well...
Thursday, January 8, 2015
Wednesday, January 7, 2015
The Joy of Starting Over
We all search for that one reason things happen the way they do, when typically, it's a multitude of little things that add up over time...sort of like compound interest or something. It's natural. We all want one thing to fix and make it better. My dramatic weight loss 5 and a half years ago was successful for many reasons. I had many motivating factors-concern about how my health would affect my family, outright vanity, and honestly, a need to demonstrate that if I wanted to tackle the problem of my weight, I had more intellectual and physical ability to do so than others. And once I discovered racing, there was a competitive instinct that I've seldom possessed in life.
As with my weight loss, my eventual weight gain occurred because of many factors. At what, in hindsight, was the peak of my athletic conditioning, I logged a 21 hour and 41 minute finishing time in the Arkansas Traveller 100. It was good enough for 6th place on a brutal day of severe weather and subsequent freezing temperatures. I was in the top 5 up until the last 5 miles of the race, when a fellow competitor that I am on friendly terms with blew by me like I was standing still. Regardless, I was over the moon with my finish. Furthering my glee, this person (Reid) wrote in the race report that he published in the Arkansas Ultra Running newsletter that one of the motivating factors he had over the course of his training for this race was to beat me! ME!!! The back story is that in a 50 mile race the preceding spring, I had recognized Reid from the same race the year before (when he saved me from making a wrong turn) and made friendly conversation while running about 10-15 miles together. I ended up pulling 30 minutes ahead of him, though, by the end of the race. He related that he knew he was in comparable shape and it gave him a goal. Well, despite the fact that he was successful, the mere fact that I (of all people) had become someone that had become good enough at such an extreme event that others were envious and set goals to beat me...really upped the pride in my accomplishments and inflated my ego to epic proportions.
This pride blinded me to the fact that I had trained for that race like an animal. During week days, I had very strict mileage goals. If I missed a run at lunch time, the running shoes came out as soon as I came home and I got those miles in. I planned my work around my runs, making sure I was never gone far enough away from the office to keep from missing them. I'd kept my diet pretty severe that year, as well. That spring I had logged my lowest adult weight ever, 155 lbs. Some of that weight had come back on by race day but I was still comfortably in the 170's.
But after the race, my confidence in my own abilities led me to up my food indulgences. "I can burn it off," I said. And I HAD been able to do so in the past. But this time was different. What seemed like a minor event that occurred on race day came back to haunt me. It still does to this day. At the beginning of the race, about 4-5 miles in, I stepped into a mud puddle. My right leg slid rapidly forward as I unknowingly planted it into the puddle. Instead of letting myself fall, my instinct kicked in and a braced myself over my leg, stiffening and putting all my weight over it in an effort to stop the slide. I really didn't feel anything bad at the time. But post-race, I did notice a little bit of pain high up on the inside of that leg. The slight pain never really subsided. I felt it every morning when I ran. Sometimes worse than others...but it was ever present. The pain made itself known when I planted and pushed off with my right leg, especially when I was attempting to run with any sort of speed. Foolishly, I entered another 100 mile race early the following year, where I tripped over a root and caught myself in exactly the same manner with the same leg. It only made it worse. This really slowed down my runs and I would speculate the calorie burn I got from them, as well.
But, as I said, there were multiple factors. In the same race where I ran with and beat Reid, I was ultimately unimpressed with my finishing time. Yes, it was about 20 minutes faster than the year before. But I went into the race a LOT better trained, having already run two marathons that calendar year and shedding more holiday weight gain than I had the year before. Twenty minutes was a bit of a letdown.
Minus a couple miles of this race (the Ouachita Trail 50 miler), it's not overly tough, minus ever-present rocks. However, four miles in, there's a 1000 foot climb up Pinnacle Mountain, a prominent point just outside of Little Rock. It's a brutal climb when you're engaged in a competitive race. Pinnacle is literally a giant pile of boulders. So you are going hand over hand and hopping where you can. Well, this is the only part of the race that I really had never simulated in my training. Before my first running of this race, I didn't run a single inch off concrete or the treadmill. I did use a pretty intense incline program on my treadmill, though.
But I reasoned after my disappointing 2012 finish that maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe I needed some real challenging terrain to train on. As luck would have it, I found said terrain right behind my office. My office sits just on the edge of the dam of a manmade lake. The channel of the bayou that it impounds carved some steep terraces out of clay and ironstone. These became my new training ground as I ran up and down the steepest portions I could find. But, like with the injury I had incurred, this change in training slowed down the pace of my runs. I assumed that all the extra "vertical" would pay big dividends. Well, maybe it would have if I had been able to maintain my weight. But the loss of any real fast runs, either in the morning, due to my twitchy groin pain, or during my slow but hilly lunchtime runs really seemed to take its toll.
And it wasn't just my weekday training that plodded along at a slower pace. After a few fits and starts, my wife began to build up her distance in her own running program with the goal of a half marathon finish. I ran the race with her in early 2013. Having achieved this milestone, I encouraged her to aim for a marathon. Now, since training for my second marathon, I had the benefit of being in the weekly marathon group that I spied while training for my first. I made many friends through it and my ultras and almost always had someone to run with. My wife didn't, though. While I was running with friends, she was watching our kids or working. As she pushed forward with longer and longer distances, she and I both wanted to run these weekly runs together.
Over the previous years of running marathons, I had built up to a typical long run pace in the high 8 to low 9 minute mile pace. Obviously with this being Jen's first push into these distances, she covered them nowhere near that fast. 10:30 to 11:00 minute paces were typical. Again I was losing some speed on my runs. But it was so enjoyable to run with her and help her reach her goal that I didn't care.
Ultimately her runs led to another issue-lack of time. To achieve two runs a day, I typically woke up around 4:30-4:45 am to log that morning five miler. But with Jen's schedule at least as busy as mine, we had to compete for that morning time. The fact that we have small children means we can't run together. So...I had to wake up even earlier. And with my groin injury slowing me down, I had to account for typically another five minutes. This led to me sleeping in a few mornings just because I couldn't wake myself or at the very least, it led to me curtailing some runs for fear of making Jen late for her morning run.
But I can't blame it all on running slower. I ate a good bit worse than the years before. I'd become so strict in my dieting that it led to awkward social situations. I didn't eat the cookies people brought to work to share, didn't loiter at office birthday parties, and didn't go out to eat with co-workers on the rare occasion that they did so. It finally made me feel like I was ostracizing myself and that it wasn't good for the longterm health of my career. So...I relented. And not just at work but with my family in similar situations. I'd grown tired of ordering the chicken or tiny steak, tired of not being able to enjoy eating a pizza. I'd used a few bouts of vegetarianism in previous years to strategical avoid overeating. This, too, was out.
All these factors led to me not being able to shed the holiday weight gain I typically dropped like a rock the preceding few late winters/early springs. By April 2013, when I had been at around 165 the previous few years, I struggled to get to 180. As a result, I did NOT get that even better finish at the year's Ouachita 50. Rather, I finished exactly an hour slower than the previous year!
The ensuing two years have seen me hit peaks and troughs in my weight but the trend has been relentlessly upward as the miles have decreased and the calories have increased. After a disappointing Arkansas Traveller this year, where I dropped due to lack of training and really, lack of will to finish, I sought treatment (finally) for the groin pain and some plantar fasciitis that probably popped up due to the extra weight I've been carrying while trying to continue to train for long races. The therapy has been slow and honestly I'm not convinced I'm ever going to recover. But, in the past, I've had these little pains disappear. I'm hoping beyond hope that it might happen this time, eventually. My physical therapist tells me there's no reason it shouldn't, just that my injury is stubborn because I left it untreated for so long.
But thanks to the Christmas holidays and a subsequent rare cold that left me immobile for days, I ended the year exactly 75 pounds higher than that record low of 155 pounds. But a new year brings a new start and I've GOT to make a push. Jen, who's had much more success in keeping in shape, and I have a marathon planned for the end of the month. Though I'm in horrible shape, I still feel as if I can probably pace her through it to a good time. But I've got to get back into my running in a big way between now and then. This week I've already logged more miles than I have in probably the last two. As part of her New Year's goals, Jen has tried to find healthier meals and snacks to make for the family. She's found some surprisingly good and not in anyway bizarre meals to cook. They're just things I never thought to make or was unssuccesful in getting the family to eat in the past. But with her making the push, it makes it a lot easier.
Finally, one more tool has fallen into my lap. While surfing the internet a few days back, I happened upon an advertisement for a juice cleanse at a discounted price. Honestly, I think juice cleanses are pseudo-scientific baloney one step below magical weight loss pills. But I bought into it anyway because of the underlying proposition of trying to adhere to what amounts to a severe calorie restriction plan for five days. Jen's cooking and my return to something resembling a running routine has already allowed me to shed 6 lbs of Christmas weight gain. If the "cleanse" allows me to drop a few more pounds, my sincere hope is that it will snowball from there. We'll see. I've only taken one of the planned juices so far and it's going to be difficult, to say the least. And that particular blend was probably the most appetizing of the six daily concoctions I am supposed to imbibe. But, by golly, if I can run 100 miles, surely I can make myself consume this stuff for 5 days. We'll see. Time for that second juice of the day!
As with my weight loss, my eventual weight gain occurred because of many factors. At what, in hindsight, was the peak of my athletic conditioning, I logged a 21 hour and 41 minute finishing time in the Arkansas Traveller 100. It was good enough for 6th place on a brutal day of severe weather and subsequent freezing temperatures. I was in the top 5 up until the last 5 miles of the race, when a fellow competitor that I am on friendly terms with blew by me like I was standing still. Regardless, I was over the moon with my finish. Furthering my glee, this person (Reid) wrote in the race report that he published in the Arkansas Ultra Running newsletter that one of the motivating factors he had over the course of his training for this race was to beat me! ME!!! The back story is that in a 50 mile race the preceding spring, I had recognized Reid from the same race the year before (when he saved me from making a wrong turn) and made friendly conversation while running about 10-15 miles together. I ended up pulling 30 minutes ahead of him, though, by the end of the race. He related that he knew he was in comparable shape and it gave him a goal. Well, despite the fact that he was successful, the mere fact that I (of all people) had become someone that had become good enough at such an extreme event that others were envious and set goals to beat me...really upped the pride in my accomplishments and inflated my ego to epic proportions.
This pride blinded me to the fact that I had trained for that race like an animal. During week days, I had very strict mileage goals. If I missed a run at lunch time, the running shoes came out as soon as I came home and I got those miles in. I planned my work around my runs, making sure I was never gone far enough away from the office to keep from missing them. I'd kept my diet pretty severe that year, as well. That spring I had logged my lowest adult weight ever, 155 lbs. Some of that weight had come back on by race day but I was still comfortably in the 170's.
But after the race, my confidence in my own abilities led me to up my food indulgences. "I can burn it off," I said. And I HAD been able to do so in the past. But this time was different. What seemed like a minor event that occurred on race day came back to haunt me. It still does to this day. At the beginning of the race, about 4-5 miles in, I stepped into a mud puddle. My right leg slid rapidly forward as I unknowingly planted it into the puddle. Instead of letting myself fall, my instinct kicked in and a braced myself over my leg, stiffening and putting all my weight over it in an effort to stop the slide. I really didn't feel anything bad at the time. But post-race, I did notice a little bit of pain high up on the inside of that leg. The slight pain never really subsided. I felt it every morning when I ran. Sometimes worse than others...but it was ever present. The pain made itself known when I planted and pushed off with my right leg, especially when I was attempting to run with any sort of speed. Foolishly, I entered another 100 mile race early the following year, where I tripped over a root and caught myself in exactly the same manner with the same leg. It only made it worse. This really slowed down my runs and I would speculate the calorie burn I got from them, as well.
But, as I said, there were multiple factors. In the same race where I ran with and beat Reid, I was ultimately unimpressed with my finishing time. Yes, it was about 20 minutes faster than the year before. But I went into the race a LOT better trained, having already run two marathons that calendar year and shedding more holiday weight gain than I had the year before. Twenty minutes was a bit of a letdown.
Minus a couple miles of this race (the Ouachita Trail 50 miler), it's not overly tough, minus ever-present rocks. However, four miles in, there's a 1000 foot climb up Pinnacle Mountain, a prominent point just outside of Little Rock. It's a brutal climb when you're engaged in a competitive race. Pinnacle is literally a giant pile of boulders. So you are going hand over hand and hopping where you can. Well, this is the only part of the race that I really had never simulated in my training. Before my first running of this race, I didn't run a single inch off concrete or the treadmill. I did use a pretty intense incline program on my treadmill, though.
But I reasoned after my disappointing 2012 finish that maybe that wasn't enough. Maybe I needed some real challenging terrain to train on. As luck would have it, I found said terrain right behind my office. My office sits just on the edge of the dam of a manmade lake. The channel of the bayou that it impounds carved some steep terraces out of clay and ironstone. These became my new training ground as I ran up and down the steepest portions I could find. But, like with the injury I had incurred, this change in training slowed down the pace of my runs. I assumed that all the extra "vertical" would pay big dividends. Well, maybe it would have if I had been able to maintain my weight. But the loss of any real fast runs, either in the morning, due to my twitchy groin pain, or during my slow but hilly lunchtime runs really seemed to take its toll.
And it wasn't just my weekday training that plodded along at a slower pace. After a few fits and starts, my wife began to build up her distance in her own running program with the goal of a half marathon finish. I ran the race with her in early 2013. Having achieved this milestone, I encouraged her to aim for a marathon. Now, since training for my second marathon, I had the benefit of being in the weekly marathon group that I spied while training for my first. I made many friends through it and my ultras and almost always had someone to run with. My wife didn't, though. While I was running with friends, she was watching our kids or working. As she pushed forward with longer and longer distances, she and I both wanted to run these weekly runs together.
Over the previous years of running marathons, I had built up to a typical long run pace in the high 8 to low 9 minute mile pace. Obviously with this being Jen's first push into these distances, she covered them nowhere near that fast. 10:30 to 11:00 minute paces were typical. Again I was losing some speed on my runs. But it was so enjoyable to run with her and help her reach her goal that I didn't care.
Ultimately her runs led to another issue-lack of time. To achieve two runs a day, I typically woke up around 4:30-4:45 am to log that morning five miler. But with Jen's schedule at least as busy as mine, we had to compete for that morning time. The fact that we have small children means we can't run together. So...I had to wake up even earlier. And with my groin injury slowing me down, I had to account for typically another five minutes. This led to me sleeping in a few mornings just because I couldn't wake myself or at the very least, it led to me curtailing some runs for fear of making Jen late for her morning run.
But I can't blame it all on running slower. I ate a good bit worse than the years before. I'd become so strict in my dieting that it led to awkward social situations. I didn't eat the cookies people brought to work to share, didn't loiter at office birthday parties, and didn't go out to eat with co-workers on the rare occasion that they did so. It finally made me feel like I was ostracizing myself and that it wasn't good for the longterm health of my career. So...I relented. And not just at work but with my family in similar situations. I'd grown tired of ordering the chicken or tiny steak, tired of not being able to enjoy eating a pizza. I'd used a few bouts of vegetarianism in previous years to strategical avoid overeating. This, too, was out.
All these factors led to me not being able to shed the holiday weight gain I typically dropped like a rock the preceding few late winters/early springs. By April 2013, when I had been at around 165 the previous few years, I struggled to get to 180. As a result, I did NOT get that even better finish at the year's Ouachita 50. Rather, I finished exactly an hour slower than the previous year!
The ensuing two years have seen me hit peaks and troughs in my weight but the trend has been relentlessly upward as the miles have decreased and the calories have increased. After a disappointing Arkansas Traveller this year, where I dropped due to lack of training and really, lack of will to finish, I sought treatment (finally) for the groin pain and some plantar fasciitis that probably popped up due to the extra weight I've been carrying while trying to continue to train for long races. The therapy has been slow and honestly I'm not convinced I'm ever going to recover. But, in the past, I've had these little pains disappear. I'm hoping beyond hope that it might happen this time, eventually. My physical therapist tells me there's no reason it shouldn't, just that my injury is stubborn because I left it untreated for so long.
But thanks to the Christmas holidays and a subsequent rare cold that left me immobile for days, I ended the year exactly 75 pounds higher than that record low of 155 pounds. But a new year brings a new start and I've GOT to make a push. Jen, who's had much more success in keeping in shape, and I have a marathon planned for the end of the month. Though I'm in horrible shape, I still feel as if I can probably pace her through it to a good time. But I've got to get back into my running in a big way between now and then. This week I've already logged more miles than I have in probably the last two. As part of her New Year's goals, Jen has tried to find healthier meals and snacks to make for the family. She's found some surprisingly good and not in anyway bizarre meals to cook. They're just things I never thought to make or was unssuccesful in getting the family to eat in the past. But with her making the push, it makes it a lot easier.
Finally, one more tool has fallen into my lap. While surfing the internet a few days back, I happened upon an advertisement for a juice cleanse at a discounted price. Honestly, I think juice cleanses are pseudo-scientific baloney one step below magical weight loss pills. But I bought into it anyway because of the underlying proposition of trying to adhere to what amounts to a severe calorie restriction plan for five days. Jen's cooking and my return to something resembling a running routine has already allowed me to shed 6 lbs of Christmas weight gain. If the "cleanse" allows me to drop a few more pounds, my sincere hope is that it will snowball from there. We'll see. I've only taken one of the planned juices so far and it's going to be difficult, to say the least. And that particular blend was probably the most appetizing of the six daily concoctions I am supposed to imbibe. But, by golly, if I can run 100 miles, surely I can make myself consume this stuff for 5 days. We'll see. Time for that second juice of the day!
Tuesday, January 6, 2015
In the beginning...
In the beginning, I was fat. The combination of a working mother, an overindulgent grandmother, and bad luck in the genetic lottery set me on the path. I don't hold anything against them. Being a parent so many years later, I don't know how they didn't beat my bratty younger self to death. I'd say I was just a little on the stocky side until about the fourth grade. That's when everything started to snowball. There are plenty of awful mid to late 1980's pictures of me in awesome, rad 80's apparel with a gut poking out. I was in that now seemingly incomprehensible latchkey kid demographic. Living only a block from my elementary and middle schools, I walked to and from school but was typically soon-after checked in on by my grandmother. This often meant either trips to the nearby convenience store for chips and an ICEE, snacks from my grandfather's family store, or a trip to McDonald's or Burger King. Then, my mother would get off work at 4:30 every day. When she got home, she would fix a normal dinner for the family. Of course, already being full, I got to be very picky about her food. I'd say by junior high, I was probably fixing my own dinner most of the time. Either way, I wasn't active enough to "stomach" the extra calories and the weight kept adding on. I never felt horribly obese. But I was typically the second fattest boy in my class. The only thing that kept me from being picked last for every team was the fact that I usually got picked over the kid who just seemed totally incapable of ANYTHING athletic.
My first attempt at doing anything in the name of fitness was during junior high. My mom, a yo-yo dieter, and one of my brothers, who was always more overweight that I, latched onto the running boom. My mom bought them both running shoes. I, too, insisted on a pair. But being a kid, I quickly lost interest, even though my brother underwent a dramatic transformation and lost probably 100 lbs.
Puberty brought things back into balance a little bit and the year round physical activity associated with high school football kept me in decent shape. But I stayed on the heavier side of things and stayed on the bad side of 200 pounds from my freshman year of high school on. 200 would have been great on the over six foot frames of my brothers or dad. But it was a little too much on the 5'9" body I possessed.
College saw a real end to any intense physical activity and I packed on the freshman 15 for quite a while. Finally, in grad school, I decided to make a change. I was training to be an archeologist and had capped the previous season's fieldwork with an embarrassing day on an excavation that I had to beg leave from due to the fact that I'd overexerted myself in the heat. Sometime over that following winter, something snapped. Perhaps it was because my then-girlfriend had moved off to attend pharmacy school in another city, disrupting my unhealthy college routine of going straight to her place after classes and lazing the evenings away with her and her roommates. This routine had typically involved napping, eating fast food, and sitting outside chain smoking. Either way, I'd discovered Men's Health magazine and ordered a weight loss book hawked in the pages within. While I attempted to eat a more health, balanced diet, I basically substituted whole grains for white breads and gave up fast food for more chicken and lean meats made at home. I also began a little running program.
Now, I knew nothing of formal distance training. My mom and brother both topped out at doing about 2-3 miles daily. My other older brother, then a Green Beret, told me stories of running sub 7 minute miles that gave me a little bit of a target speed-wise. I began by walking 2 miles. Eventually, I started running the second mile. For about 5 months, I did this daily, dropping a second here and there until I got to a good 7 minute pace. Every now and then I would mix in a 3 mile run and even made it to 6 miles a couple of times. Then summer rolled around and my physically demanding archeological fieldwork saw me cut my running out once I reached about 170 pounds, down from around 230 when I started. My girlfriend joined in and also began running a little, losing a bit of weight herself just in time for our wedding the next summer. From then until we began having kids, we ate relatively healthy and ran sporadically.
Things veered of course during my wife's first pregnancy. Her father passed way unexpectedly, truly traumatizing the whole family. Then, after our first kid came along, any notion of health and fitness was swamped by exhaustion. We told ourselves we didn't have time to fix nice healthy meals. The fact that my wife was in med school then residency didn't help, nor did two additional children.
But finally, about 6 years ago, my wife Jennifer decided she needed to get in better shape. She had started in private practice just after having our third child and wanted to work off the pregnancy weight for good. About the same time, my paranoia about my own health (Web MD convinced me I was dying of something new every week from 2004-2009), my envy of my wife's progress, and the beginning of a new job collided to rouse me out of a then-six year lapse of any fitness related activity. My new job saw me located along the shore of a rural East Texas lake and at least 15 minutes from the nearest McDonald's. Not wanting to waste my time and gas driving so long and risking going over my allotted lunch, I brought quick microwave meals from home. I'd mentioned to a co-worker that I should exercise during lunch instead. She mentioned the office once had a fitness push and the result was a room full of exercise equipment that now went unused. She told me I should ask the cleaning staff if they could clean up the room for my use. They did. A co-worker and I began using the room immediately.
I sought out what had worked for me before-running. Though by this time, I was at an all-time high weight of about 252 pounds. This meant I had to start VERY slowly. It took at least two months before I made it two miles. But even then, even though I was eating healthier and running every day at lunch, the weigh wasn't coming off. I decided to do something drastic, something I'd never even heard of anyone doing before. I decided to run early in the morning before work, in addition to my lunchtime run. This seemed to work. After discovering the wonderful double-edged sword of online registration, I entered my first 5k two months out. The constant two-a-day runs and fear of embarrassment began to work their magic. By race day, I was down about 15-20 pounds.
I picked what my now-quite experienced eye would call a miserably tough course for a beginner and during August of all times. I had to make one hell of a finishing kick to avoid being the last male running finisher, just nipping the 70 plus year old man in long, black tube socks. But a spark had been lit. For the next few months, I entered every local 5k I could, knocking about ten minutes off my time by Christmas. The weight continued to melt off. Along the way, I entered my first half marathon, despite my wife's protests that I would die. I lived and debuted at a respectable beginner time, just under 2 hours.
About the same time, that miracle of the internet ALSO alerted me to the presence of a marathon training group that met every Saturday for long runs at the park down the street. So THIS is who all those runners were I was seeing every Saturday morning while I built up long runs for my half marathon! I got on their website, looked at their schedule, and discovered that they had used the same half as a midway through training tune-up race. I wondered...could I keep track of their long run schedule and also target their goal marathon that coming February? Well, nothing I could do but try! Over the next two months, I kept building my long runs, culminating in two 20 milers. Certain that I was prepared as the training group was, I set out with my terrified wife for the inaugural (since joining the Rock n' Roll series) Mardi Gras Marathon.
The marathon was a wonderful experience. People knock the Rock n' Roll series for being too corporate, too big and too cookie cutter. But for a beginner, this can be a good thing. The expo/packet pickup was easy and the souvenirs were plentiful I probably bought $300 worth of clothes and shoes and other items. The race was similarly well-organized. I made the typical beginner mistake of going out too fast. Once I hit the proverbial wall at around mile 20, I refused to walk, though, and gritted it out for a 3:59 finish. I'd attained the sought after sub-4 hour finish that many first time recreational marathoners shoot for. However, I felt awful at the finish line. I'm sure I can dig up the footage of me telling my wife on video that I would never again run a marathon.
To avoid making a long story longer, I'll just say that was seven marathons, four 50ks, four 50 milers, and three 100 milers ago (not to mention 68 and 60 mile DNFs at two separate 100s). I even placed as high as 6th place in one of the 100's! In these past six years, I've made more friends through running than I did through all other means combined in the previous 9 years I'd lived in my current city. But, unfortunately, over the past two years, over-racing led to injury. That, combined with the inevitable bit of boredom has seen my running mileage gradually taper off and my weight creep back on. And it's an odd state I find myself in. I can still go out with my marathon group for 20 on the weekend yet I'm only about 25 pounds lighter than I was when I started my running craze 6 years ago this spring. Along the way, in the last two years, I've grasped at every dietary and fitness straw I could. Low Carb, vegetarian, HIIT, you name it...I've tried but not been able to use any to stave off the pounds.
But with a new year, several goal races, and a desire not to lose my identity as a runner, I make this push. This first work week of the new year, I've so far managed to run every day, something that has been more and more elusive over the past year. With a refocus on my nutrition, thanks to my wife's new-found discovery of eating less processed and organic food, we'll see where it goes!
My first attempt at doing anything in the name of fitness was during junior high. My mom, a yo-yo dieter, and one of my brothers, who was always more overweight that I, latched onto the running boom. My mom bought them both running shoes. I, too, insisted on a pair. But being a kid, I quickly lost interest, even though my brother underwent a dramatic transformation and lost probably 100 lbs.
Puberty brought things back into balance a little bit and the year round physical activity associated with high school football kept me in decent shape. But I stayed on the heavier side of things and stayed on the bad side of 200 pounds from my freshman year of high school on. 200 would have been great on the over six foot frames of my brothers or dad. But it was a little too much on the 5'9" body I possessed.
College saw a real end to any intense physical activity and I packed on the freshman 15 for quite a while. Finally, in grad school, I decided to make a change. I was training to be an archeologist and had capped the previous season's fieldwork with an embarrassing day on an excavation that I had to beg leave from due to the fact that I'd overexerted myself in the heat. Sometime over that following winter, something snapped. Perhaps it was because my then-girlfriend had moved off to attend pharmacy school in another city, disrupting my unhealthy college routine of going straight to her place after classes and lazing the evenings away with her and her roommates. This routine had typically involved napping, eating fast food, and sitting outside chain smoking. Either way, I'd discovered Men's Health magazine and ordered a weight loss book hawked in the pages within. While I attempted to eat a more health, balanced diet, I basically substituted whole grains for white breads and gave up fast food for more chicken and lean meats made at home. I also began a little running program.
Now, I knew nothing of formal distance training. My mom and brother both topped out at doing about 2-3 miles daily. My other older brother, then a Green Beret, told me stories of running sub 7 minute miles that gave me a little bit of a target speed-wise. I began by walking 2 miles. Eventually, I started running the second mile. For about 5 months, I did this daily, dropping a second here and there until I got to a good 7 minute pace. Every now and then I would mix in a 3 mile run and even made it to 6 miles a couple of times. Then summer rolled around and my physically demanding archeological fieldwork saw me cut my running out once I reached about 170 pounds, down from around 230 when I started. My girlfriend joined in and also began running a little, losing a bit of weight herself just in time for our wedding the next summer. From then until we began having kids, we ate relatively healthy and ran sporadically.
Things veered of course during my wife's first pregnancy. Her father passed way unexpectedly, truly traumatizing the whole family. Then, after our first kid came along, any notion of health and fitness was swamped by exhaustion. We told ourselves we didn't have time to fix nice healthy meals. The fact that my wife was in med school then residency didn't help, nor did two additional children.
But finally, about 6 years ago, my wife Jennifer decided she needed to get in better shape. She had started in private practice just after having our third child and wanted to work off the pregnancy weight for good. About the same time, my paranoia about my own health (Web MD convinced me I was dying of something new every week from 2004-2009), my envy of my wife's progress, and the beginning of a new job collided to rouse me out of a then-six year lapse of any fitness related activity. My new job saw me located along the shore of a rural East Texas lake and at least 15 minutes from the nearest McDonald's. Not wanting to waste my time and gas driving so long and risking going over my allotted lunch, I brought quick microwave meals from home. I'd mentioned to a co-worker that I should exercise during lunch instead. She mentioned the office once had a fitness push and the result was a room full of exercise equipment that now went unused. She told me I should ask the cleaning staff if they could clean up the room for my use. They did. A co-worker and I began using the room immediately.
I sought out what had worked for me before-running. Though by this time, I was at an all-time high weight of about 252 pounds. This meant I had to start VERY slowly. It took at least two months before I made it two miles. But even then, even though I was eating healthier and running every day at lunch, the weigh wasn't coming off. I decided to do something drastic, something I'd never even heard of anyone doing before. I decided to run early in the morning before work, in addition to my lunchtime run. This seemed to work. After discovering the wonderful double-edged sword of online registration, I entered my first 5k two months out. The constant two-a-day runs and fear of embarrassment began to work their magic. By race day, I was down about 15-20 pounds.
I picked what my now-quite experienced eye would call a miserably tough course for a beginner and during August of all times. I had to make one hell of a finishing kick to avoid being the last male running finisher, just nipping the 70 plus year old man in long, black tube socks. But a spark had been lit. For the next few months, I entered every local 5k I could, knocking about ten minutes off my time by Christmas. The weight continued to melt off. Along the way, I entered my first half marathon, despite my wife's protests that I would die. I lived and debuted at a respectable beginner time, just under 2 hours.
About the same time, that miracle of the internet ALSO alerted me to the presence of a marathon training group that met every Saturday for long runs at the park down the street. So THIS is who all those runners were I was seeing every Saturday morning while I built up long runs for my half marathon! I got on their website, looked at their schedule, and discovered that they had used the same half as a midway through training tune-up race. I wondered...could I keep track of their long run schedule and also target their goal marathon that coming February? Well, nothing I could do but try! Over the next two months, I kept building my long runs, culminating in two 20 milers. Certain that I was prepared as the training group was, I set out with my terrified wife for the inaugural (since joining the Rock n' Roll series) Mardi Gras Marathon.
The marathon was a wonderful experience. People knock the Rock n' Roll series for being too corporate, too big and too cookie cutter. But for a beginner, this can be a good thing. The expo/packet pickup was easy and the souvenirs were plentiful I probably bought $300 worth of clothes and shoes and other items. The race was similarly well-organized. I made the typical beginner mistake of going out too fast. Once I hit the proverbial wall at around mile 20, I refused to walk, though, and gritted it out for a 3:59 finish. I'd attained the sought after sub-4 hour finish that many first time recreational marathoners shoot for. However, I felt awful at the finish line. I'm sure I can dig up the footage of me telling my wife on video that I would never again run a marathon.
To avoid making a long story longer, I'll just say that was seven marathons, four 50ks, four 50 milers, and three 100 milers ago (not to mention 68 and 60 mile DNFs at two separate 100s). I even placed as high as 6th place in one of the 100's! In these past six years, I've made more friends through running than I did through all other means combined in the previous 9 years I'd lived in my current city. But, unfortunately, over the past two years, over-racing led to injury. That, combined with the inevitable bit of boredom has seen my running mileage gradually taper off and my weight creep back on. And it's an odd state I find myself in. I can still go out with my marathon group for 20 on the weekend yet I'm only about 25 pounds lighter than I was when I started my running craze 6 years ago this spring. Along the way, in the last two years, I've grasped at every dietary and fitness straw I could. Low Carb, vegetarian, HIIT, you name it...I've tried but not been able to use any to stave off the pounds.
But with a new year, several goal races, and a desire not to lose my identity as a runner, I make this push. This first work week of the new year, I've so far managed to run every day, something that has been more and more elusive over the past year. With a refocus on my nutrition, thanks to my wife's new-found discovery of eating less processed and organic food, we'll see where it goes!
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