Weighty Issues: February 2010 Update

Photo by Sharon Young

One more month gone, time to have another look at my (non-) progress on loosing weight.

Here’s my weigh in in the first days of March:

• Weight: 88,2 kg (started at 88,3 kg, goal was around 87kg)
• Body Fat: 17,8% (pretty much where I started)

So on both fronts, apparently I was standing still. In reality, it was more a story of one step forward (seeing 87 point something quite consistently), two steps back (with some bad eating around the middle of the month), and a step forward again. Not good, but it could have been much worse.

Looking back at my “bad days”, it was a combination of a number of things: Some stress at work, a couple of birthdays, and some frustration with the winter weather not allowing a focused training. (All of these by their own shouldn’t have been a problem, two might have been tricky, three was just too much.) The result was way too much eating way too often, and also some pretty reckless indulgences. Not good at all.

At least I’m back on track now. The last week of February was going well and I had a great race last week. I hope to get into the lower 87s by the end of March, but I’m not sure how I’m going to react to my first ever training camp – a week of cycling focus on Mallorca (or Majorca which seems to be the English version of the name). I’m really looking forward to some better weather and a chance for some big training volume, but I have no idea what influence that will have on my weight. Hopefully I can lean out a bit more.

I’m getting a bit sick of this constant struggle, and I can totally understand the problems of people that have to loose weight for health reasons. Still, for them it’s a question of good health, for me it’s a question of good performance. I think I can do way better in my IM this summer than last time, and I know that weight will play an important role in that. Now if only I can get some decent training volume started …

Weighty Issues – January 2010 Update

Photo by Like_the_Grand_Canyon

I’m already a bit late for my “weighty issues” update. So without further ado, here are the results from February 1st:

• weight 88,3 kg (goal was around 88kg)
• body fat 17,9 (not much movement here)

These numbers are okay, and I think from the sheer numbers I am back on track. One thing that I’m noticing is that my waist seems to be getting thinner, my belt is almost ready for the next hole. However, my weight fluctuates a lot from day to day, so it’s hard to be sure where I am exactly. But at least I’m moving in the right direction, even if I’m not being totally perfect.

Now the tricky part starts .. I’m about where I was for the last two years of racing, and I want to go beyond that. So the next kgs are important, but they will be hard, too. Especially with all the things going on and the weather still being bad here in Northern Germany. But I’d like to get around 87kg by the end of February.

One little note on the picture: It’s a chocolate Santa, similar to the one sitting next to my printer as a reminder to not eat too many sweets. It’s been working quite well, except for the occasional chocolate. One of my problems is that I can’t eat just one piece when I opened a package …

Weighty Issues – December Update

After my funky, injury-plagued November and December, my weight plans have suffered a bit.

Another photo by radialmoster.

Official Weigh-In January 5th

• Weight: 89,3kg
• Body Fat: 18,3%

This means that I have gained about three pounds since the end of October and that I can pretty much say good-bye to my original weight plans for this summer’s racing.

Updated Plan

While this setback is quite frustrating, other than time not much is lost. But it is important that I get back on track now. Now that my knee is almost back to normal and I can do some decent training again, it’s still quite realistic to reach my best Ironman racing weight ever (which was sub-85kg in 2007). But if I want to do that, I really have to “be good”. Good thing is that my wife and I have decided on a joint effort to eat well and healthy.

Rather than focus only on “loosing weight”, here’s a couple of secondary, but more specific goals:

• Drink more water (rather than coffee/latte)
• Portion control (one plate of pasta should be enough)
• Eat more fruit and vegetables
• No pigging out, try to go zero on sweets, cake & chocolate (one white chocolate santa claus is left and will survive till my IM in July!)
• Try to follow a modified weight watchers plan at least 6 out of 7 days per week (modified with regards to increased training activity which ww does not really adapt to very well, so some more “good” carbs before/during/after sessions)

I hope that this will allow me to drop one kg per month. At the start hopefully a bit more, so my goal for end of January is to get under 88kg again. I hope that I can manage that! I’ll keep you posted …

Weighty Issues – Mid November Update

After taking a little injury break, it’s time to fess up … so here is my latest update from the weight front.

Another photo by radialmoster

Official weigh in Nov 16th: 88.3kg; 17.7% body fat

My goal was to get under 88kg at the end of October. I was hovering around that mark when I hurt my knee, and had a full week of no sport, “tricky situations” with a business trip and conference, and quite a bit of worries and frustration. Then another week of slowly ramping up my training, so I’ve lost two full weeks (which corresponds to one pound at my goal rate of 1kg a month). No magic is going to help me get that back, so I’m relaxing my goals a little bit .. as December will be a bit tricky as well, I’m shooting for under 87kg at the end of December now.

Of course, I’m a bit disappointed, but I think I have realized where my mistakes were and am ready to be better. The frustration led to some poor decisions, but I’ve also gotten a bit less strict in my diet. This makes it hard to get the weight down, especially around all the extra goodies that float around at this time of the season. So, I have to save the treats for the special occasions and not make them a regular, almost daily occurrence.

What has me a bit puzzled is that my weight seems to be moving all over the place. I’m stepping on the scales almost every morning, and I’m seeing shifts of three to four pounds from one day to the next. While some of this is pretty normal, I don’t really have a good explanation for these larger movements, sometimes I eat pretty late in the day, sometimes I have to get up a bit earlier and so on. But four pounds?! All of this makes it pretty tricky to evaluate where I am which sometimes gives me an extra excuse (or extra frustration) for another goodie. Weird.

I’m a bit worried that all my lofty weight goals are starting to get eroded little by little. At the end of last season I had identified weight as one of the areas I have to work on, and I hope I can remain committed to my goals of getting down to a decent race weight by summer. I hope that making my goals public in this blog helps me keep myself honest and focused on this goal. Hopefully, with my knee better, I can get back on track. I’ll keep you posted …

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!

Weighty Issues

My wife and I just came back from our long, wonderful vacation. After stepping on my scales, I was back in real life.

When I left, I was at 88kg (morning weight). The first time I stepped in my scales, I was at 94 point something. Some it was extra water from the long flight back, and I was hoping to get a bit further down once things got back into balance.

It took about a week .. and I came in at a bit over 91kg – which means I gained 3kg in a four week vacation. A bit too much, but certainly better than the 6kg I had to assume after my first weighing in. Also, pretty typical for the usual gain I experience on vacation when I more or less shut down my training. (All I managed this year was three runs.)

So I’ve got my work cut out for me. I haven’t had much success loosing weight in the last years, but by now I’m more or less convinced that I won’t make much progress unless I significantly reduce my weight. Maybe stating the goals publicly (well, as public as my blog is ;-)) will help me keep honest.

I’ve raced my best IM-distance race in Roth 2007 at roughly 85kg and 15% fat on my scale (specific fat numbers not too exact, but good as a basis for comparison). I want to be way under that for next year’s IM, which means that one important goal for the rest of this year will be “body composition”. I’ve got almost four months left, so it would be great to get down to the same numbers at the end of the year. For the race, I’d like to race at 82kg. I hope that the hard training for IM will help take care of things in 2010.

To sum up:

	weight	fat
today	91kg	21%
end of 2009	85kg	15%
end of June 2010	82kg	<14%

Please help me committed to these goals! I’ll keep you posted on my progress.