Monday, November 22, 2010

A Pleasant Surprise

Weekly Stats
Current: 210.6
Weekly Loss: 4.4
To Go: 35.6
Total 114.4

The pleasant surprise this week is when I stepped on the scale, I was down 4.4 lbs. I think I can attribute this to two things. Most days, I was very frugal on eating. I tried on those days to eat every three hours, but tried not to go over 300 calories for each meal. This kept me at about 1800 calories on those days. The other thing, is with the colder weather and trying to get my leg better, I mixed up my workout routine a bit. I had bought some Bob Harper workout DVDs and they are quite the challenge. Even the people that he has one to put through the workout struggle, moan and complain at times. I can't do all of the workouts, but I can do most of them and keep up for the hour. Mostly it has been fun. I also was able to run a bit further on each run until I needed to rest my leg so that was good too. I am hoping by the end of the week to be up to four miles straight.

Cold weather has taken a firm hold. We have snow on the ground here. I am better equipped to run in the cold, wet weather this year. The run this morning went well. I stayed nice and warm most of the run. When we get some more snow, I have plans on giving snowshoeing a go. I'll let you know how that goes.

Shout outs to Hillary this week. She has kept her weight off and has even lost a bit more. Whoooooohoooooooo! Way to go! Andy had another good outing with his cross country team! Nice job coach. Martha, Hillary, Chris and Rachel, I trust that you are all doing well on the no weight gain challenge. It's not to late for anyone else to commit about not gaining any weight during the holidays. Get yourself weighed before Thanksgiving, write it down and then weigh back in during the first of the year. The official weigh in will be between Jan 1 and 5th to determine if you made your goal. Hang in there and I will too!

5 comments:

  1. Nice work Bruce. Gordon and I have started that challenge and I have dropped 6 lbs. this past week. Good Luck everyone.

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  2. Nice job Martha! That treadmill torture must have paid off. Glad to see Gordon is on board as well!

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  3. YA!! Great to see a loss after all of that fluctuating.

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  4. Bruce, I read one of your comment's on someone else's site and I have a question for you about heart-rate. I am now training for my first 10k. Any suggestions as to what heart-rate I should maintain as I run?

    Thanks,
    Big Clyde
    bigclydesdale@gmail.com

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  5. Hey Clyde! Thanks for stopping by! As far as heart rate goes, there are formulas to figure out what your maximum heart rate is. One of the standards is 220 - [your age]. From there you can times your heart rate by where you would like to maintain. I have read all sorts of different opinions on where you should be. Anywhere from 60 - 80%. What I have found the most useful for me (short of having a stress test) is to use the conversation method. If the pace that you are maintaining will allow you to keep up a conversation with a little effort, then I find that to be a good pace for longer distances. If I push harder than that, I use up too much glycogen and have to walk to recover before too long. The interesting thing for me is that when I keep it at in the low 150's, I can cover longer distances. But if I were to use a formula, I am running much too fast. That is the controversy with using a formula. So my suggestion is to use the conversation method and go from there. I set my monitor accordingly and let it warn me if I am going too fast (but I can usually tell if I am pushing too hard after doing this for about a year).

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