I'm so excited because John and I are now officially signed up for the Carlsbad Half Marathon. Woo-hooo!!! Not only that, but when we signed up I saw that there is a Triple Crown event – run three half marathons in the same year and get a Triple Crown finisher's medal! I am SO doing that!
But now I have to get in shape. I lost a lot of the athleticism I had when we came back to America and practically never walked again. (Very sad. You walk everywhere in Sydney.) So I need to gain the ground I lost plus I want to get in better shape than ever. I gained about ten pounds when we returned to America. Heck, we arrived the day before Thanksgiving! So now I want to lose 20 pounds before the first race, 159 days from now.
With moderate effort, I should be able to lose the required one pound per week before the race. But I also want to add at least five pounds of muscle, ten would be better. So if I meet my goal to lose 20 pounds, and I gain five pounds of muscle, I'll have actually lost 25 pounds of fat. Happy day!
To gain the muscle, I'll have to go work out at the fitness center in our apartment complex. They have an elliptical machine that I've just started using, as well as several weight machines. Unfortunately, I can't do some of them yet because the lowest weight is too high. But I've got some hand weights here at home I'll start with. I'm not exactly sure what I'll do, but I'll come up with some kind of plan and write it down. Then I can keep track of increases and see how far I get in the next five months.
Plus, I'm going to change how I've been running/training. I thought it was all about mileage, but I can run more miles without getting any faster. I'm reading through some of our running books and finding things I missed or forgot about. So now I'm going to try to make a schedule of not just adding more miles, but doing interval training, too (run fast, then run regular speed, then sprint, then slow down, etc.).
John and I weren't able to run the City2Surf race in Sydney this year. (Very sad, we loved it the last two years!) So we had a pretend race day here at home that weekend. We ran 8km – the C2S is 14km – with hills in a half decent time. My best time for a half marathon is 3 hours 47 seconds in the Sydney Running Festival half marathon in 2010. I want to run the Carlsbad half marathon in under 2 hours 45 minutes.
Yeah. I've got my work cut out for me. 🙂
Then I want to run at least one second faster at each of the next two races. The second one is in La Jolla, CA, in April. The third one is in San Diego in August. The August one will be the hardest for me because of the heat. Give me a 40 degree (F) race start anytime! Part of the reason John and I haven't been training much this summer is because the coolest it's been in the mornings is 68 degrees. Running in that temperature saps your energy.
So I'll try to gain 5-10 pounds of muscle and lose 20-25 pounds of fat in the next 159 days. (Yikes!) Then I'll try to gain a little more muscle before April. Because I'll need to be in far better shape to run a summer race and beat my January and April race times, I'll need to lose more fat and gain more muscle by August. If I could lose ten/gain ten I'd be in the best shape of my life!
Of course, having been in “this” shape for so long, it's a little hard to imagine actually achieving these goals!
BUT…
They aren't unreasonable goals. And I don't have to think about next August right now. Today, I only need to think about losing two pounds this week, working at the gym, and getting 2-3 runs in.
One day at a time. Starting now.
