I ended last month’s post with a list of things to come for July. I ended up accomplishing most of the items, the one I missed was not joining in with the Do Life tour. Too darn hot to run a 5k in the evening! Ben finished his tour and celebrated with a full ironman that he finished in under 15 hours… that’s just crazy!

Aside from the week of vacation in Galveston, my diet and weight loss was consistent.  Sitting in the car for 8 hours twice in one week just isn’t as active as I’m used to, I guess.  But I did get in one 5k run along the seawall in Galveston, which fulfilled the second run of the Jeff Galloway Half-Marathon training class I started on RunKeeper.

What I like about this training class is the run-walk interval focus, that’s what I’m most comfortable with, and the 4-1 normal run intervals are just right for where I’m at fitness wise.  The longer runs are becoming a bit daunting, but increase only 1.5 miles every other week.  The alternating weeks are 800m intervals with an emphasis on meeting a goal 2:20 half-marathon.  That time is unreachable for me, so I have to be careful that I find a goal pace that stretches me a bit, but won’t lead to injury.  I’ll just take it week by week.

Running the longer distances (which brings with it longer times out on the pavement), has made something apparent in my weight-loss measurements. Here… I’ll show you a chart!!

The blue lines are my run distances, with the first 5 mile run on July 9th and lasted 71 minutes.  The next two runs of 6 miles (July 16 – 99 minutes) and 8 miles (July 30 – 117 minutes) are associated with a large apparent weight gain.  A note on my weights: With the heat of this summer, I’ve been getting up and running before breakfast, and weighing in after my run, so my weigh-ins on run days are in a dehydrated and depleted state.  That said, the longer runs (>90 minutes) seem to have a lot more of recovery time to get back to a normal weight than my normal 45 minute runs.  I’m going to be watching this as my distances increase to see if my body gets better at recovering, and also be more careful about what I eat as I recover.

What is good about that chart is that in the last two weeks of the month I pretty much weighed in less that 280 (which was at the point where my loss stalled in May).  So I think I’m back on a good sustainable downward slope.  I’ve adjusted my calories to be at the pound and a half loss per week, and I’m eating back my exercise calories and staying above my LoseIt! Computed BMR.

For the month of August, my goals are to be consistent with my weekly runs, and seeing how a hard interval run can do with my pace.  The longer runs are daunting, 9.5 and 11 coming up in August, and then 11, 13 and 15 in September.  It’s a little scary, but at the same time a bit of a confidence booster to face my fears and accomplish the goals, a little bit at a time.

Quote of the Month: Comes from Shawshank Redemption (Thanks AMC for the re-airing and the pop-up video thingies!)

Red narrating:

… That’s all it takes really, pressure, and time. …

That’s in the middle of a really long narration where Red is describing Andy’s escape from Shawshank prison.  The end of that phrase discusses how Andy crawled to freedom through a sewer pipe for 500 yards, or about 5 football fields.  That is also a help at the end of a run, to remember that running, largely, smells better than crawling through a sewer pipe.

Have a great August!