Marathon Pre-Training, Week 3

This week's stats:

• 3.81 treadmill miles
• 0 outdoor miles
• 1.5 hours on the elliptical machine
• 3 weightlifting sessions
• 2 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 3 weeks
• 19.41 treadmill miles
• 5.71 outdoor miles
• 5 pounds lost

We didn't spend as much time at the gym this week because I spent two 9+ hour days at work completely rearranging the sales floor at 5 different stores.  That was unexpected.  I was only scheduled to help with the reset of my store on Wednesday, but somebody on another reset team called out on Tuesday and I got a 6am phone call from my boss asking me to get ready as quickly as possible and fill in.  So not only was Tuesday really strenuous and longer than usual (we finished the two stores for that day faster than expected, so we went ahead and got my store mostly finished by the end of the day so the team was a whole day ahead of schedule), but my sleep was cut short.  Plus, I was running around so much I kind of lost track of time and forgot to eat until way past noon.  By the time I went home I'd barely eaten half my day's calories, had a throbbing caffeine withdrawal headache, and was physically too overworked to safely make it through my workout.  Plus, my knees hurt from kneeling on the floor so much.  (That's what she said.)  I only anticipated having to finish up at my store on Wednesday, but since we were working so efficiently the team leader called the two stores that were scheduled to be reset on Thursday and told them we'd go ahead and get them done a day early.  So that was another unexpected day of long and strenuous work.  Good experience, but I was pretty wiped out.  We went ahead and caught a short nap Wednesday evening and then did a full workout because I didn't want to skip any more than necessary. I especially didn't want to skip out on strength workouts because we had a training session Friday morning, so I ended up cutting cardio time instead.

So after a weird week, my pre-training routine called for just an easy one-hour walk on Saturday.  I don't consider an hour a "long" anything.  We rarely if ever spend less than an hour on cardio anyway.  So instead of doing a slower paced long walk I decided to do a time trial and see how far I could go in an hour at maximum effort.  Unfortunately, the weather's been a bit too cold for my liking lately, so I did it on the treadmill.  I started off at 3.5mph, which is what I averaged the last time I was training consistently, and assessed after every quarter mile whether I felt like I could go faster.  I maxed at 4.2mph and averaged just barely under 4.  I'm feeling really good about my progress.  It's already exponentially easier for me to maintain 4mph than it was just a month ago.  Until my actual training schedule kicks in I think I'll turn all my one hour Saturday walks (every third week) into time trials and adjust my intervals and tempo walks accordingly to see just how far I can push my speed before May. The main reason I wanted to test my speed was to get a better idea of how fast I should be doing tempo walks, intervals, etc.  I like having some kind of guideline to go by beyond perceived exertion.  I don't have a long history of exerting myself, so I have a feeling my perception is not exactly reliable just yet.  Our trainer has been proving again and again we're capable of far more exertion than we think we are, so...

I'm starting to flirt with the idea of running.  Well, jogging.  I'm certainly not going to try and run the full marathon, but it certainly wouldn't hurt my efforts to plan to run a bit of each mile, even if it's a small bit.  At this point I'm just going to leave the possibility open and see if I am even able to walk at close to 5mph without naturally transitioning to a jog or run.  My sister/marathon partner has done her share of running and, at the insistence of her 50-year-old joints, has retired to walking now, but she can easily walk at 5mph or faster.  Part of me wants to avoid running because she's already said she's going to do the marathon at my pace and she doesn't want to run, but I have a feeling my walk/run pace won't be any faster than her best walking pace, so whatever.  No sense holding back because I'm worried she won't want to keep up.  It's a fucking marathon!

On the weight loss front, I think I've spotted a pattern.  It seems I don't lose weight in the week immediately following a session with our trainer.  And that makes sense, since he always kicks our workout up a couple notches each time so we're building more muscle after the first couple of goes at the new routine than we do after we've gotten used to doing it.  My boss (who used to be a competitive bodybuilder) says that's normal and should level out after a while.  I know I'm losing fat -- it's visibly obvious.  I'm getting smaller, my clothes fit better, and I'm getting muscle definition where there didn't used to be any.  Now I'm just dying for Andrew to weigh and measure us -- I want to see how much my body fat percentage and measurements have changed.

Weird side effect of training?

One might think that when one undertakes a time-consuming new pursuit, other important tasks might take a back seat.  Oddly enough, though I now spend at least an hour at the gym (usually more) at least 4 if not 5 days per week, I'm actually finding more time and motivation to expend on other things on my to-do list.  Last weekend I had the sudden urge to clean my desk area, turn a lot of important notes scrawled on various scraps of paper into usable digital files, send a package that I'd been meaning to send to a friend for months now, get my eyes examined...  just generally get some of my shit together.  The more time I spend working out, the less time I seem to want to spend dicking around unproductively on the internet.  I haven't played any of my Facebook games since we joined the gym.  In the past week or so I've worked on getting the thin layer of tree sap off my car that's been there for a very long time, disconnected the dryer from its vent and cleared out the wad of damp lint that had been making drying times extremely long, and finally went searching for a screen to put over our shower drain.  Things that have been on my to-do list for months and months are finally getting done, and the things that I've been using to procrastinate just don't seem appealing anymore.  I've started painting my fingernails again, something I haven't done on a regular basis for years.  And the only thing that's changed between the end of 2010 (when I spent most of my time outside of work and sleep glued to my virtual cafe, frontier, and city) and now is that I'm spending a whole lot more time working out.

I hope it lasts.

Marathon Pre-Training, Week 2

Another week done. 

This week's stats:

• 6.73 treadmill miles
• 5.71 outdoor miles
• 2 hours on the elliptical machine
• 3 weightlifting sessions
• 1 yoga class
• 0 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 2 weeks
• 15.60 treadmill miles
• 5.71 outdoor miles
• 3 pounds lost

No weight loss on the scale this week.  Just hanging out there at 212.  Disappointing, but I think there might be a hormonal reason for that.  I would blame it on us going to dinner at a friend's house last Saturday night and eating a bit too much, but going a couple hundred calories over goal one day can't possibly counteract the amount of high-intensity gym time we put in this week, so I'm figuring it's just a timing thing, if you know what I mean.

I got to go outdoors!  The weather has been beautiful and warm this week and the snow from the blizzard has all melted, and though it was windy, cloudy, and cool yesterday morning it was still great walking weather.  We headed out to a paved trail I hadn't tried before and walked an hour out, then turned around and walked back.  I walked with my girlfriend, so it was a slower pace than I would have gone alone, but at this point I'm not stressing over it.  I really didn't want to walk a new trail all alone, especially knowing that it went out into unpopulated areas.  Next time I think I'll try it alone so I can go faster.  I liked the trail, though.  Enough other people on the trail to make it feel safe, not enough to feel crowded.  It's certainly not somewhere I'd want to walk in the dark.  But it's nice and straight, so in the daylight you can clearly see if there is anyone ahead of or behind you on the trail for fairly long distances.

Little equipment plug:
I use miCoach on my Blackberry to track my outdoor walks, and I'm impressed with how much data it gathers for a free app.  I'm all for investing in good equipment when it's necessary, but not if you can get the same functions cheaper or free, so having a free app that tracks my route, maps it for me, tells me how fast I'm going and such in real time, and gives me access to all sorts of stats about speed over time and such is great.  Granted, it's dependent on my phone maintaining GPS contact, but so far it hasn't lost GPS often enough to be a problem.

This week we ended up splitting our strength training workouts into a night of arms and core and a night of legs.  This cuts each workout down to an hour or slightly less, which is more manageable.  And, as we discovered tonight, if instead of turning each workout into one very large circuit we break it into smaller circuits of two or three exercises involving equipment in close proximity to each other in the gym, we get a faster and far more strenuous workout.  That's mostly because it doesn't give other people time to reset the machines or move the equipment somewhere else requiring us to chase down and reset everything all the time.  It really breaks the groove when you have to hunt down the ten pound medicine ball three times in one workout.  (Yes, we did make the ten pound ball joke once or twice, and got a good laugh about it, but we're over it now.)

I'm making friends with the treadmill.  I really like it for interval walks -- the time goes by faster when you're changing speeds and keeping track of shorter distances and times, and it's nice to be able to precisely control speed changes. 

We switched the order of our workouts to put strength training first and cardio second.  On nights when we work our arms, it's no big deal.  Wednesday night after our leg workout I went for an hour on the elliptical.  It wasn't hard until about 45 minutes in, which doesn't usually happen otherwise.  Not so hard I couldn't keep up, but I definitely felt like I had to work harder to make it to the 60 minute mark.  I'm curious to see how it affects future workouts.

Learning real self-motivation and undoing years of negative reinforcement

The first part of this past week was a little bit stressful for me, for reasons which are stupid.  Mondays are usually our total rest day because our schedule is especially tight.  Sundays, on the other hand, are usually a day when we have all the time in the world to workout.  But last weekend we had that dinner at a friend's on Saturday night which kept us out until 1am, meaning very, very little sleep.  We normally would have napped a few hours on Sunday and still hit the gym.  But last Sunday after work I had a meeting just a few hours later.  That left no time for a nap, so we filled the time with our Valentine's dinner (sushi and sashimi).  By the time I was home from my meeting we both knew we were too tired to lift weights (dangerous!) and would sleep straight through 'til morning if we tried to nap.  So we skipped the gym.   We did go to the gym and do cardio Monday night so we wouldn't end up having two rest days in a row, but Sunday would have been cardio AND weights, so I felt like I'd slacked off on top of eating too much over the weekend. 

Yes, I know that missing one workout doesn't undo all my progress or anything, and when a body needs rest you have to give it rest.  Shit happens.  But this is what happens when I have a great plan to follow and hit a bump along the way.  I get twisted over the fact that I've deviated or fallen behind or wasted time on something else, and I get hung up on trying to catch up by working twice as hard for however long it takes to make up for what I didn't do.  When that doesn't work (and it really never does) I get overwhelmed by how far behind I've gotten (because as I try to catch up by tacking extra onto my to-do list I inevitably make the tasks so hard to complete that I can't keep up) and eventually I just throw in the towel.

So lesson one I have to teach myself is that a missed workout is simply a missed workout.  I just have to keep going and forget about it.  It's not like my other strength workouts this week suffered for the one I missed.  I don't freak out like this over my dietary changes.  If I have a day when I go over my calorie limit by a little bit it's not a big deal.  I don't eat less the next day to make up for it.  I don't obsess about catching up.  Part of it is that with my "diet," I've been at it long enough to know that one day here and there doesn't really effect my weight loss progress.  I don't have that same reassurance from personal experience that missing a workout here and there won't mean I'm that much less ready for the marathon.  I know it shouldn't, but I haven't been through it enough to know that it won't. 

But, it's like every other mental/emotional issue I've worked through over the past few years.  Now that I see that the problem exists I recognize that it's a pattern in my life.  And knowing that it's a pattern means that I can figure out where it comes from and be that much closer to stopping it.

Looking back, I guess I was never taught to truly self-motivate. Yes, I achieved a lot as a kid, and if I knew I was expected to accomplish something by a certain date I would get it done without a parent hanging over my shoulder. But I didn't ever have to set my own agenda or motivate myself to do something without parents or teachers getting involved to support me. I picked projects and involvements that others would take an active role in encouraging.  Even then I would purposely procrastinate or do things differently than certain adults thought I should, just to have a little bit of control over the situation, I think.  But in the end I did what they wanted me to without a lot of prodding.

But things don't work the same in the adult world as they did when I was a kid, and I realize now that all these years I've been seeking the kind of praise and recognition I always used to get from my achievements.  As an adult, though, I've been focusing on goals and tasks that people DIDN'T think I should or could do, and therefore aren't going to actively try and help you along or throw you a party for succeeding. And when you get down to brass tacks, I didn't get the praise and recognition I did as a kid for being talented or smart or capable, I got it for following directions and fulfilling the expectations of others. It's not that I did great things, it was that I did the right things.

Training for this marathon is not something I have a ton of active support for. That is to say that I have a lot of people wishing me luck or telling me they think I can do it, but nobody actively helping oversee or assisting my training. My sister will be doing many of my long walks with me, but she's not keeping after me to make sure I do all my other workouts. It's my own job to police myself, but to be honest I am far too good at letting myself off the hook at times, after which I compensate by freaking out on myself about how I messed up. I learned how to go easy on myself in college, when I realized that nobody would rain fire and brimstone on my head if I wasn't perfect. And I learned the art of the freakout from my mother, who will unleash a storm of nagging when she doesn't think I'm conducting my life properly. I've gone to great lengths to avoid her nagging by gradually excluding her from more and more of my personal life, but I guess I've learned to nag myself in her absence.

What I haven't learned to do in her absence is the part after the nagging: the commandeering. She steps in without asking and does what she thinks I should be doing, should have already done, or should have done differently. I've basically been conditioned to quit if I hit a snag. I've come to subconsciously believe that I can only persist in my undertakings up to the point where I "mess up" -- after that point I'm apparently not capable of finishing since somebody always steps in to save me whether I need it or not.

Nobody can save me with this, though. If I fall behind with training nobody can step in and finish it for me. And that's good, because I'm sick of being made to feel incapable.  I'm sick of having my pursuits taken out of my hands and finished by someone else. But it's also a little intimidating because, as much as I've always hated it, my safety net is gone. Having someone take over and finish what I start hasn't been good for my psyche but it has protected me from real failure and disappointment. I don't have evidence to suggest that without my mom's well-meaning interference I would have been able to reach the end goals alone. But it allowed me to take some pretty big risks, knowing I had that safety net. And it allowed me to be able to claim that I could have succeeded if only given the chance.

So here I am, trying to prove to myself that I can function without a safety net and without the need for external supervision, and it takes all of one week for crazy insecurities to come bubbling to the surface. I know I just have to ignore the bubbling while I keep putting one foot in front of the other. 

Marathon Pre-Training, Week 1

My first full week of pre-training is done. So far I'm not pushing myself too hard. I won't begin to follow an actual marathon training schedule until the last part of May, so what I'm working on now is just building mileage and speed, losing weight, and increasing my overall cardiovascular health and strength.

This week's stats:

• 8.87 treadmill miles
• 0 outdoor miles (because the weather sucks ass)
  
• 3 hours on the elliptical machine
• lifted weights three nights, full body each night
• 3 pounds lost
  

We also met with our trainer. He switched up a lot of our leg exercises, and pretty much every muscle in my upper left leg is insanely sore right now from the single leg presses. I guess that confirms which leg is my weak one. Also, I have a bruise on the back of my neck from doing squats on the Smith machine, and my abs are sore. I think this may be the week when we have to start splitting our weight training routine over two sessions so we don't have to work out for three hours at a time.

My biggest question right now is whether to do cardio before weights or the other way around. I've been doing cardio first because we have to warm up anyway, so I figured we might as well just lump the two together and get it out of the way early. We've also already tried the approach of doing a half hour of cardio before and another half hour after our strength training, and it was considerably more difficult to operate the elliptical on legs already tired from lifting weights. Our trainer, though, suggests strength first and then cardio so that when I do my cardio I get my body used to running a little closer to empty, so to speak. If I go to the internet with the same question it seems that doing weight training first is the consensus among those who are focused on weight training, since doing cardio first can negatively impact your ability to lift as much as you could otherwise. By the same token, though, those who run races seem to advocate cardio first for a similar reason -- if you lift and then run, you'll have a harder time running. For now, since I'm not yet racking up long miles in a structured training schedule (I'd consider this my marathon "pre-season"), I think I'm going to try doing cardio after strength, at least for a while and see if it makes it harder to make progress either with strength training or my walking. (One of my resolutions is to trust the advice of other people who know more than me, like my trainer, so....) The more I read up, the more I think that once I start my actual training schedule I'll work my legs on Wednesday when I do my shortest technique walk, and otherwise focus my strength training mainly on arms and core. Unless I come across compelling evidence to suggest some other approach, of course.

I'm starting off with a new pair of running shoes. On my previous attempts at marathon training I went with Nike Pegasus on the recommendation of my sister. I used them exclusively for training until I realized I didn't have a marathon to train for, and then I just wore them into the ground. So I used part of my tax refund to get a new pair of shoes. I tried on a few things, but ended up getting another pair of the Pegasus, although these are snazzy neon colored. I'll have to get one more pair between now and the race, and I'm trying to figure out if I can afford to splurge another hundred bucks on a second pair of snazzy neon Pegasus(es?) to hold onto for when this pair reaches the end of their mileage allowance. Still mulling that over. It's not like there won't be Pegasuseseses I can buy at that point. They just probably won't be neon pink and green. THEY'RE SO PRETTY!!!

Although I'm not following a full training schedule just yet, I'm already incorporating some of the structured walks into my routine now. I'm doing one night of interval training to try and increase my speed. I'm also doing a tempo walk one night with the same goal in mind. And to get myself used to long walks without doing too much too soon, I'm going to cycle through 1 hour, 1 1/2 hour, and 2 hour walks on Saturday mornings without worrying about mileage. I did my long walk yesterday on the treadmill. Hour and a half. The boredom wasn't too awful, but I think if I'd had to spend any more time on that treadmill I would have had to resort to watching TV, and I've never really done that while exercising. I spend a lot of time on my workout music mix, and while it's all I need outdoors, the gym has too many things that break my zen after a while. I think mostly it's the music they play which is too loud to completely drown out with my headphones. I'm sorry, but the Jonas Brothers just doesn't work as motivating workout music for me. I'll be glad when the post-snow muddy mess starts to dry out and I can hit the trails outdoors.

Greetings and salutations!

So, I'm training for my first marathon.

This is a huge deal for me and is a personally significant undertaking for a lot of reasons (outlined on my other blog here). It's also a big deal simply considering that I currently weigh 212 pounds, it's been years since I participated in any kind of race (a 10k back in the late 90s), and I've never been much of an athlete.

So how did I get here?

(I swear I'll try to be brief...)

It started back in May of 2009 when I had a bit of a, well, breakdown over my weight. I'd reached 255 pounds, and after being obese my entire adult life I hit bottom in a store dressing room while trying on a little black dress. I decided that things really needed to change, and I started a complete lifestyle makeover. I joined Sparkpeople.com, changed my eating habits, and started exercising. My weight began dropping, I felt a ton better, and I hooked up with a great group of internet buddies who were on their own weight loss journeys.

A few months into it all, one of my online friends suggested that we pick a marathon and all meet up in person there, as most of us have never met in real life. The idea was that we find a race that had different distance options so everyone could participate to their own comfort level. After some research, I decided that although it sounded quite ridiculous, I could train enough to be prepared to walk a marathon given enough time. We had our sights tentatively set on a marathon seven months from that point, and given that the beginner marathon walking training plan I'd found only took six months I figured I was golden.

So I started training. Walking had been my main source of exercise to that point, anyway, and I really enjoyed it. But by the time I'd gotten about two months into the training schedule the plans to meet up at the marathon fell apart. Nobody else could travel that far on that particular weekend. I stopped training, and went back to just walking for fitness. But I couldn't shake the desire to do a marathon. So I then made plans with one of my sisters (who was preparing to deploy with the National Guard for a year and has done marathons before) to do one together when she got back. We tossed around some ideas for which marathon to do, but time got away from us and although I started training again, we eventually realized that neither of us was going to be ready in time.

But now she's back, and not only have we settled on the 2011 Chicago Marathon, we've actually registered and made travel plans. This time it's for real.

Since the beginning of my weight loss and fitness journey I've lost 55 pounds, gained 20 of it back (over that year when my sister was deployed and neither of us was conscientiously training, and I wasn't even really tracking my nutrition very closely), and have now lost 8 of those 20 I gained back. This time I have a gym membership, a personal trainer, my sister to do long walks with, and my girlfriend to train with at the gym. I've embarked twice now on a training schedule over the course of a year and nine months and made it a third to a half of the way through each time, so I've built up a decent amount of mileage. I know what I'm getting into, at least.

Yes, I'm overweight, not in amazing shape, and not a runner. Maybe someday I'll become a runner, but right now my 212-pound body has other things to say about that. But I love to walk. I love to walk as fast as I can for long periods of time. It's very... zen.

So between now and October 9th I have to lose as much weight as I reasonably can, gain enough speed to be able to make the distance in less than 6 hours, and build my endurance so that I can walk that long. Currently I'm doing weight training under the guidance of my trainer three to four days a week, occasionally taking yoga classes, and splitting my cardio time between the treadmill (interval training, tempo walks, and 1-2 hour walks on the weekends) and the elliptical machine (because it's fucking fun).

I want to document my training progress if for no other reason than having something to look back on at times when I'm feeling stuck or unmotivated. Some documentation of my mental state, physical condition, what's been difficult and how I've dealt with it, my cumulative mileage and weight loss, etc.

So welcome to what might be the most boring blog on the planet! Woohoo!