Just be happy already...

It occurred to me the other day after making a Facebook post bemoaning that shopping was still difficult as a size 8 that I'm looking at this all wrong. When I was at my heviest I wore a size 18/20, couldn't shop in "normal" stores and would have given anything to be a size 12. Size 12 was the smallest I could remember ever being even through High School and University and I don't ever really thinking I was too big then - I pretty much thought, when I was a size 20, that a 12 was as low as I could ever physically get... So here we are today at a size 8, and I see myself looking in the mirror and still critisizing the same things I did previously. If the size 20 version of me could hear me now I'd probably slap myself into next week. So while I think it's ok to try and strive to make things better, I also need to learn to relax a bit and appreciate what I've done to get here. Perhaps less stress will make the end of this journey just a bit easier. And the next time I moan perhaps just threatening to slap me into next week will be enough!

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Ups and Downs

Or should that be downs and ups?

So I've done race 1 on my long list of races to complete this year, that being Harry's Spring Run Off, the 8K race around High Park. Now High Park is my local park, we run the dogs there, and spend quite a bit of time there in all seasons. It's a great park with lots of fabulous scenery, but of course no scenery was ever known to be flat, pretty always has bumps and curves right? In the case of High Park this consists of a couple brutal uphill climbs, on at about 3.5k into the 8K and the other is the very last 500m of the race - yeah, what bright spark thought that one up! Not to mention the rolling hill paths as you get down around the bottom of the park. All in all it's quite a challenging course. It had numbers in my head of what I thought I'd be able to do the race in, but all my calculations were done in reference to my last few 5K runs which were all on mostly flat routes, adding to it this being the longest race I've attempted so far, I probably should have not been quite so ambitious with the finishing number I was looking for. Needless to say my 54:18 wasn't the time I was looking for, but looking back at the race overall, I managed to keep an even pace across the entire race, I didn't stop to walk at any point in time, and even fought my way up the brutal last 500m hill to the finish - my husband was there at the hill ready to start yelling and shouting at me if I looked like I was having signs of giving up on the final hill, and I think he was suitably impressed that he got to keep his voice! Still, it's a learning moment, and definitely a good preparation for the Sporting Life 10K that's coming up - there's hills in that, but luckily they all go in one direction - down!

In recognizing small accomplishments I know I'm finally getting faster at this running thing. Last August I did a timed mile with the run coach at our gym and I was a couple seconds shy of a 10 minute mile. I was suitably impressed by that at the time, although completely wiped out after doing it! This past Wednesday, with the same running coach, we had our group morning run. Warm-up was a 2K run from the gym to High Park, then it was a timed mile around the upper loop, this time the mile was 8:56, so I've dropped a minute in under a year - it's still slow, but I'm just not a natural runner, and well, June last year is probably when I first actually started to try to run at all knowing that every triathlon I wanted to do was going to finish with that pesky run! Still, it's getting better, and there's only one way it can keep going - no need for the Olympic runners to worry anytime soon though!

Now how about some big accomplishments. Today was the quarterly fitness evaluation. I get weighed, pinched and measured, then tested in distance ran in 12 minutes, strength and isometric endurance with wall sits and the plank. It's a tough test - we start off with the run on the treadmill, now in January 2009 I managed 0.78 of a mile, today it was 1.17, as I said above, I'm not a fast runner, but I'm running, and that's more than I could say before! My strength numbers were good, nothing extraordinary, but still showing improvement, but my isometric endurance is doing some great stuff, in January 2009 I held a plank for 15 seconds, today was 2 minutes 6 seconds, add that to the wall sit that was 1:12min in January 2009, and was 3:19min today - yeah, I'm pleased about that.

As for all the weighing, pinching and measuring, since January 2009 here's some crazy numbers, overall I've lost 246.5mm of pinchable body fat - yup, just shy of 10 inches that is... Next, My body fat has gone from 57.6% down to 21.5%, that's from obese down to a "fitness" percentage according to Wikipedia. Looking more at that body fat, My first testing showed I was carrying 146.3lbs of pure fat - about 1.5x my lean weight at the time, I'm now carrying 36.9lbs of fat, yes, nearly 110lbs of fat evaporated there! It turns out that my diet may not need quite as much tweaking as I was thinking it may need either, over the last quarter I lost 11 lbs, which doesn't sound like much, but take into consideration that the pinch tests show that 9lbs of that was fat lost and not lean weight, so I'm maintaining muscle and taking off the stuff I don't need which is exactly what I'm supposed to be doing - fabulous! The thought is that there's probably another 20lbs floating about this body that I can shed - perhaps by the end of the summer - then I'll be some force to be reckoned with... oh, right in time for an Olympic distance triathlon.... er, what happened to that force again?