Weighty Issues – Update after September

In earlier posts (Weighty Issues and Planning Rest of 2009) I described my weight loss goals for my 2010 race at IM Germany. Here’s the update after one focused month of training.

Photo by radialmonster

October 1st: 89.3kg

My goal weight for the end of September was to get under 89kg. At the “official” weigh-in on October 1st, I was at 89.3kg. So – I missed my first goal. But my weight was moving around quite a bit: By next morning I was at 88.3kg, the day after that I was at 88.7kg. A bit strange to see that much movement, but all in all I was not too worried and I don’t see any reason to change my weight goals. Next up: Under 88kg by November 1st.

September training

I’m quite happy with the progress I have made in my training. I’ve put a pretty solid month together, and I’m hungry to do more in October. A couple of things show that I have a lot of potential:

• no top speed
  As noted earlier, anything faster than a 10k speed is very hard for me and I can hardly do any reasonable intervals with 5k or even faster speeds. I hope that’ll change, at least I plan to do another short (11.3k) race and do short, fast interval sessions.
  
• relatively low volume
  Because I’m not doing really long sessions (longest runs are about 14k or 1:15h), my total volume is still quite low. I think that later in the year I’ll be adding some longer sessions (at still pretty fast speeds compared to the long and slow session in preparation for my Ultra). That should also help me to loose some more weight.
  
• long time to recover from harder sessions and races
  My fitness is still not were it was, and it shows in the time I need to recover from harder sessions and races. For example, after my half-marathon in Alstertal, it took me until the end of the week to get some freshness back. I was still going out each day, but the sessions were short and slow. Once my fitness gets better, I hope to be able to recover faster and get back to harder training sooner.

October plans

There are two more races I have lined up in October:

• October 10th: Citylauf Lübeck – 11.3k – goal: sub50 minutes (4:25min/k)
• October 24th: Lübeck Half-Marathon – goal: sub1:37h (4:35min/k)
  

These races should get me closer to the fitness required for my goal race at the end of November where I want to run 26k under 2 hours (4:37min/k pace) on a pretty hard course. The goals for October are attainable if I manage to get my training in.

In the first half I want to do some faster intervals (10k pace and faster), in the second half I want to add some longer tempo pace runs (20k run with 10k at half-marathon pace). If the weather holds up, it should be fun!

Another big item on my calendar: Watch IM Hawaii on IMLive on October10th. There is a lot of contenders for the top spots .. should be a great and exciting race!