Marathon Pre-Training, Week 6

At least my sunburn from last weekend healed quickly.  I was up to the itchy phase by Monday, it was peeling by Tuesday, and gone completely by Thursday.  I picked up some ultra mega sunblock for future use.  Wasn't really fond of the red forehead look, and even less fond of the "my forehead is peeling off and running away from my face in flakes" look.

This week's stats:

• 7.90 treadmill miles
• 3.31 outdoor miles
• 0.5 hours on the elliptical machine
• 4 weightlifting sessions
• 2 pounds lost

Total pre-training stats:

• 6 weeks
• 41.86 treadmill miles
• 20.83 outdoor miles
• 10 pounds lost (now @ 205)

I ran again this week.  Even ran for a full quarter mile on Thursday night, which isn't much but was an accomplishment for me.  Jogged a bit at the beginning of each mile on our walk yesterday.  And now my knees hurt.  They didn't hurt until today, and it's only when I kneel or squat and have to get back up.  Walking doesn't hurt.  So I'm going to take it easy on them for a bit and not run or jog at all until the pain is gone.  Took an Aleve and threw a bag of frozen veggies on it when I got home from work.  Feels better already, but I'm definitely not doing my lunges today.  But I'm not skipping the gym.  I will go and do the strength training minus the lunges, and then hit the elliptical in reverse to start working my quads more.  Leave it to me to get runner's knee after two weeks of sort-of jogging.  I probably need to adjust my form -- as if I actually have "form."  Mostly I just do whatever I can to get myself to move in a running-type motion, as unnatural as that is for me.  But, if I think about it, I think I do strike with the heel, and need to correct that.  Certainly it's going to take some time to get my joints used to the pressure of 205 pounds pounding pavement, and anything that makes that harder needs to be fixed.  In the meantime, it's time to focus on the walking until my knees feel better.

Our trainer cut our strength training workout down significantly.  Back to doing the whole routine in one night.  Basically we're combining exercises to streamline the process, like doing lunges and shoulder presses simultaneously.  I'm a little sad, actually.  I kinda liked spending all that time lifting weights.  But I am a fan of efficiency.  And this gives us more time for cardio, so we'll go with it.  Might actually give me time and motivation to take some more classes.  I haven't been to yoga in weeks.

We did have him weigh us again, and he says we've made the best progress he's seen in a while.  I'm guessing a lot of his clients aren't as hard core about working on their own as we are.  Honestly, we work harder on our own than when we're meeting with him.  Hell, with this marathon looming in the distance, I can't afford not to be a little hard core.  Anyway, my body fat percentage has gone down 3.7 points, I've lost 12.6 pounds of body fat, and I've gained 2.4 pounds of lean body mass in 2 months.  I say that's not too shabby.  Even more amazingly (to me, at least) my waist-to-hip ratio plummeted to .76.  It's hovered around .85 forever, even through the months it took to lose 56 pounds the last time.  Hooray for strength training!  It's giving me the nice, shapely ass I've always wanted! 

Got some new gear this week, too:  new sports bras to protect the girls from my forays into running (is it weird to hope my boobs will shrink before the marathon?) and weightlifting gloves because our trainer has us doing straight leg deadlifts and the textured bar hurts my dainty (lol) fingers.