" Take care to eat more organic foods and pay attention to portion sizes. Continue your exercise journey for an additional month."
Dec 31- Feb 2 was all about converting my Trans-Catalina backpacking fitness over to running. My trainer had me do a couple v02 max sprint interval workouts and spend the weekends in 1.5 hour+ long runs. The work paid off! I had been expecting to run about 11 min miles but I finished in 2:15 which equates to a 10:19 mile with negative splits (meaning my pace picked up as the race continued). This might have been because I was accustomed to training by running 1.5 minutes and walking 30 seconds for the duration. This race was so popular, there wasn't really space to have a herky-jerky pace until around mile 8 and by then I had settled into a steady running state.
Nutrition has been a little challenging, my scale weight is the highest it has ever been. I moved my perfectly broken in size 27 501's to the donation pile because I couldn't quite get enough give out of 100% cotton and life is too short to spend trapped in a denim corset. In previous triathlon training sessions, I was notorious for not fueling enough and so my body would rob any muscle gains to keep the forward momentum. This time around I am conscious to eat plenty and prioritize protein for satiation. I set myself a quota of 3 or less "eat out" stops per week (which also included coffee shops and our stay at Legoland). I weighed food for two weeks to sanity check my portion sizes. When that became too onerous, my texting accountability buddy and I started a "sin azucar para dos semanas" dare. Outside of the temptation of Girl Scout cookie season-- a few of my daughter's boxes unsale-able with rain leaking through the pickup's camper shell, this has been a less challenging challenge than I anticipated (btw, I didn't eat the cookies). Perhaps it is because almost everything I eat at this point is a whole food and I opt for organic wherever it is available. There aren't too many habitual sugar-added instincts left to weed out this season. My two screw ups were from thoughtlessness rather than temptation-- I forgot the added sugar in dried holiday fruit sampler snack I had dumped in the bottom of a chia overnight pudding just to use it up until I was wincing "too sweet" as I spooned it out the first morning of the challenge and I accidentally took a shot of Gatorade at an aid station on the half marathon when I was looking for water -- it gave me enough indigestion I skipped the next aid station to let things settle.
This Tuesday, I climbed into a DEXA scanner for my quarterly body composition check in. I am 4 total pounds heavier, 2.2 of which is more fat and 1.8 of which is more muscle. The muscle gains are really impressive for 3ish months of work and 2.2 lbs of fat is about what you would expect to happen in this time interval from eating a surplus 75 calories a day in a period which included Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. My fat percentage is somewhere in the 20th-40th percentile of women in my age bracket who are getting scanned, so there isn't much cause to change anything dramatically. In the run up to the half Ironman, I'm looking for little ways to eat a bit less (maybe skip some of hubby's wonderful home pizzas?) and move a bit more which should be no problem with my coach's training plan... and maybe track down some well-loved size 28 501's in a 1% elastic wash...
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