Greg's Running Blog

I know it’s the middle of September and I’ve been totally slacking on blog updates but August was such a great month that I thought I still have to mention it by name and write some of the specifics that have happened during the month of August in terms of running. August had a lot of milestones for me both figuratively and literally.

In August I ran a total of 202.5 miles which is the most I have ran in a single month so far. This is my biggest milestone and achievement for the month, just the sheer amount of miles I ran. It took me a total of 26 hours and 59 seconds to cover the distance in 27 running sessions for an average pace of 7 minutes 42 seconds per mile. I have burned 20,055 calories, which means if I didn’t run at all in August I’d be almost 6 lbs heavier than I am.

Another big milestone I have achieved in August was that I ran over 50 miles in a single week. From August 16th through August 22nd I ran a total of 50.1 miles which is the most I have done in a single week so far. It was week 11 in my 18 week long marathon training plan.

The biggest contributor to my 50 mile running week was my longest run so far which was a 20 mile run that was quickly followed by a 10 mile run the next day. Since then I ran another 20 mile run and I have one more planned before I can say I’m ready for my marathon on 10/10/10.

August was also the month when I finally left Texas and ran abroad. We traveled to Hungary and Mallorca, Spain where I logged a total of 111 miles including a 17 and a 19 mile long run. I also carried my Android phone on these runs and recorded some video footage that I should be posting on the blog eventually as time permits.

All in all August was an awesome month in terms of running. I ran a lot and I ran strong. So how did I do in terms of Diet? Well let’s just say that weight management and all inclusive resorts with all you can eat buffets don’t mix too well and I think I’ll need to write another blog post about that one…

Wow, it has been a really really long time since I last posted anything on my blog. No, I haven’t died and gone to heaven, I just simply didn’t have time to do updates even though a lot has been going on with me lately. I went to Europe for 2+ weeks which took up the larger part of August and there was just no way I was going to even attempt to do blog posts while abroad. Never mind the fact that the hotel I have stayed at in Mallorca, Spain had no internet connection at all which made it extremely difficult to keep in touch with anyone let alone blog.

But I am back in town, I actually have been back in town for over a week now, and I’m ready to bring some long awaited blog posts your way if you care to hang around. I’m still very tired from the trip and all the running but I will try to posts a couple of interesting and neat updates in the following weeks.

A couple weeks ago I have entered the Polar Difference Video Contest with a 2 minute video. I have put together a pretty good video of my 7 month transformation and I am one of the finalists! Right now it’s up to the people to vote and decide who made the best Polar Difference video and who is the most inspiring. I think I did pretty good and I’m asking you and everyone else who you might know to go ahead and vote for me so I can win the grand prize of $1,000 and a new heart rate monitor.If you have a blog/twitter/facebook account I would also appreciate if you’d spread the word about my transformation and my request for votes to your friends/fans/visitors.

Thanks!

I’m currently on vacation so updates are spotty but I’m still alive and well. Hopefully I’ll have some time next week to post some updates.

I’m not much of a rebel but today I did something naughty. I drew graffiti all over my neighborhood. Well don’t think for a second that I suddenly turned into a right brain artist overnight because I didn’t! I just simply had enough of the inconsistent distance measurements and estimating paces that could be off by 7-10 seconds per mile because of GPS and/or footpod discrepancies. So I went and bought a totally basic bike speedometer and some orange spray paint.

The speedometer is basic but it does everything I needed which is to measure distance accurately. I set it up initially so one revolution was 1 meter and set it in metric mode this way every 0.001 km was one revolution exactly. This way I could use it as a simple revolution counter. I rolled on my bike 50 revolutions then took a 100 ft tape measure and measured the distance. It was 329.5 ft. So I knew that each revolution of the wheel was actually 2.008 meter which is more accurate than the 2.030 meter the manual of the speedometer indicated for my wheel size. This method is actually very similar to the method that is used to certify running courses. Once I calibrated my speedometer I rode to the hardware store to pick up some bright orange paint.

With the paint in hand, helmet on head, speedometer calibrated and reset I took off from my house and marked every quarter mile on my running route. My route generally involves 1 mile running out then do a mile loop around another neighborhood then do a 0.5 mile out and 0.5 mile back leg and keep repeating the 1 mile loop and the 0.5 mile out and back until I rack up enough miles to finish off with the last mile to run home. The problem was that the 1 mile out segment wasn’t quite 1 mile and the loop was only 0.95 miles so I never knew just how much I had to lengthen my run on the 0.5 mile out and back segment to make up for the shortage.

Now I know since I measured everything out down to the thousandth of mile and my new route marking is just perfect. I can run any distance with 0.5 mile resolution from the house and get perfect mile splits. I already ran 3 miles on my new measured route tonight and ironically my footpod measured 2.998 miles with the calibration value loaded in it and my GPS measured 3.01 miles. I might have went a bit OCD and should have just used my trusty tools instead of spending an hour and a half in the scorching sun painting numbers on the road.

I forgot to put on sunscreen so my arms and neck are pretty burned right now and I rode a total of 11 miles for all the painting and verifying of the distances. I still think it was time well spent .

I’ve been writing a lot about my current and future plans and my transformation but what I haven’t shared much of is the past. My story to obesity is not the usual one, or at least not in the sense what I would consider usual. It certainly isn’t the standard “I’ve been overweight/obese all my life and finally I had this big revelation and decided to turn my life around at age 33″.

My mom and sister

Growing up I was never fat. I was actually downright skinny when I was a young boy. My sister on the other hand was always the “chubby one”. I grew up in a very nice family with loving parents and a great younger sister. We sure had our fights and I was usually the one who got punished for them as I was the older one, but all in all I had a really nice childhood. My sister wasn’t the only one who suffered with their weight in my family. My mom has always been on the heavy side and she blamed it on her upbringing. Her grandmother and single parent mom always kept encouraging her to be plump “just in case you catch a disease you’ll have plenty of reserves”. This was their mentality and it certainly had shown on my mom. She definitely had been obese for as long as I could remember.

Me and my sister

As I was growing up I have witnessed my mom’s struggle with weight and her constant goal of trying to get slimmer and lose it all. She even went to “fat camp” where they put her on a zero calorie diet for several weeks to try to get her to lose her weight. And she did lose some, as to be expected, but she gained it all back once she came back home. It was a constant, never ending battle for her. I have also witnessed my sister’s struggles with her weight and the constant nagging and denial of sweets and snacks from my parents that came with her being overweight. I was clearly the lucky one. I inherited my dad’s “skinny genes” while my poor sister was stuck with my mom’s “fat genes”. But not only I inherited the “skinny genes” I also got a good dose of my dad’s running genes.

My dad was a runner. He went to college to earn his degree in cartography and civil engineering which naturally lent itself to be on the college team of foot orienteering. If you don’t know what foot orienteering is, don’t worry, I actually had to look up the English term myself as me being born and raised in Hungary it’s not a term I have actually learned or used in English, ever. Think of it as cross country running and map reading at the same time. You have to navigate and visit several points through terrain with nothing but a topography map and a compass. First to visit all points wins the race. The sport started in Norway and it is apparently a lot more popular in Europe than in the US but I just checked and there are several local orienteering events even where I live. Having said all this, my dad did compete at college level and he did OK.

Mom pinning the bib on my friend

For me, running started when I was 10 years old. I had a friend who was training at a sport school three times a week. I was never really good at any of the team sports at school and I thought I would go with him to training and see how I liked running. It turned out that I actually enjoyed running very much. I liked it enough that what started out as a Monday, Wednesday, Friday activity in the afternoons has turned into a five times a week training within a year.

On my way to victory

By the third year into my running career I was one of the top runners in the group and I have moved from my regular junior high school to a special magnet school for athletic talent. I was swimming three times a week before school and ran on the track four to five times while ran cross country in the woods once a week. I was clearly on my way to becoming an elite athlete. I won numerous track meets and cross country events on the regional level and I was national age group champion in 4,500 meter cross country amongst 13-14 year old boys in Hungary. I have clocked 9:26 on track for 3,000 meters (5:04/mile pace for 1.86 miles) and my personal best in 10,000 meter road racing was 35:14 at age 13.

So what happened? I got tired. I burned out. By the time I entered high school I felt like I was done with running. School was taking a toll on me, I went to another magnet school, a bilingual high school where I had to learn English and my classes were taught in both English and Hungarian. I just couldn’t take running any more so I quit. And I never ran another mile unless my life depended on it for almost 20 years. The one thing that I never changed though were my eating habits.

I thought I was still growing and burning calories just like I did when I was running. I was going through chocolate and pizza like it was nobody’s business. I slowly but surely started to gain weight. Before I knew it I was getting chubby. My classmates started to make fun of me even though I wasn’t that fat. I was overweight from my lean mean running machine look but by today’s standards I was barely overweight on the BMI scale. But when you come from 140 lbs, 175 lbs starts to look pretty hefty. The last time I wore size 31″ waist pants, the size I’m currently wearing, were freshman year of high school.

If I was on The Biggest Loser Jillian would have a field day with the fact that my mom passed away when I turned 15. She would blame my obesity and overeating on the fact that my mom died. Mom mom had breast cancer and she passed away at age 39. I really don’t think her passing had anything to do with my obesity. I simply stopped exercising and kept eating the same way I used to. But my mom’s death had a lot to do with the fact that I finally turned my life around. The closer I was getting to age 39 the more I started thinking about how short life is and how much more I wanted to do in life and how living the unhealthy way in an obese body would not let it happen. So while I wouldn’t attribute my obesity to “fat genes” inherited from my mom I certainly credit her death as partially the reason why I started my transformation. As for my sister, she has turned her life around about 14 years ago when she finally became fit and she has been the skinny one ever since while I became the family fatty.

But things are turning around once again. I’m on my way to regaining, hopefully, most of my genetic given speed and running ability while losing all the excess weight while my sister is getting bigger and bigger by the minute. I expect that by the time I visit her in August she’ll be bigger than me. You might wonder why would anyone say such a cruel thing about their sister. But this time it’s a good thing as she’s pregnant and expecting a baby at the end of September .

So there you have it, my secret running past. While I certainly have lived the life of a couch potato for the past 19 years I certainly was blessed with some great running genes that are hopefully helping my new, leaner, fitter me to try to achieve my goal of running a Boston Qualifying marathon time in October.

I’m out of town for the weekend until Tuesday night so the weekly status update, my Friday photo update and some other things will have to wait. I’m also flying solo without aid while I’m out of town with the family and eating out every meal for the entire 4 day weekend. I’ll report back about my weekend and my usual posts as soon as I can!

I’m getting really tired. Tired of not sleeping enough and tired of eating 1,800 calories. I have been very strict on this diet and I’m getting so close to my target weight. But lately it is becoming a chore to eat at my diet level. With all the running I’m just “hungry like the wolf”. But I still managed to eke out a decent week in terms of diet so I don’t have that much to complain about.

I have averaged 1,852 calories a day for the week which is not that bad. I had one low day and several higher days over 1,900 calories. I definitely feel like I’m easing up on the diet even if the numbers show otherwise. Protein wise I have eaten 119 grams on average which is the lowest number I’ve had since Week 10. I have actually slowed down with the protein shakes, I don’t have one every afternoon and as you can see I’m eating more and more carbohydrates. I’m trying to limit my fat intake and some days it works some days it doesn’t.

I’m particularly happy with how the weekend turned out. On Saturday we went to a big party with 60+ people and everyone brought cookies, coffee cakes and the like but I stuck with my diet and had none of the sweets and only a handful of the savory snacks which were all home baked goods. Then after the party we went to a birthday party with my kids and I resisted any and all temptation over there too, I had nothing to eat or drink. Then we ended up going to Macaroni Grill for dinner before we headed out to see John Bon Jovi at the American Airlines Center in Dallas.

At Macaroni Grill I ate a whole bread, 510 calories, but it was OK. I had very little food up until this point so I could afford to pig out on the bread plus I knew I was going to do a long run Sunday morning and I needed the extra carbohydrates. But after eating that much bread I went with their new dish, the Aged Beef Tenderloin Spiedini. It was basically a couple of pieces of beef tenderloin and roasted vegetables with some roasted potato. It was a total of 410 calories, low on fat and great on taste. It was an awesome meal! I’m so happy to see that Macaroni Grill is offering entrees like these. The really weird thing though was that while the steak only had 620 mg of sodium, the chicken version had more than twice that much. It’s a good thing I had the beef, especially after that peasant bread that was smothered with salt.

So I had my long run of 10.7 miles on Sunday morning and overall I ran 37.7 miles (60 km) this week. It was a great week with lots of hard workouts. It was one of the hardest weeks so far and the one with certainly the most mileage. This was the last week with hill training, starting next week I’m heading to the track for speed work instead. I have burned a total of 4,367 calories this week, an average of 624 calories a day but most of the calories came on Tuesday from the hill training and from Sunday’s long run. Combine the daily average of calories burned with the 1,852 calories in and you get 1,228 net calories a day. I have lost 1.8 lbs (0.8 kg) this week which means I have lost 6,300 calories, that’s 900 calories a day bringing my calculated BMR to 2,128 calories. It seems to be correct.

I didn’t work out as much as I should have, Friday was just too hectic and I didn’t have time at lunch and I had to leave on time to take my son to soccer in the afternoon. Bottom line, I only lifted weights once instead of twice last week.

All in all I think it was another pretty successful week. I’m getting a bit worn out by the whole process, I feel like I need a bit of rest and a bit more calories to sustain my running. But just as much as I’d like to slow down I’d also like this thing to be over with so instead of dragging it out longer I’ll just keep my focus and determination for another 5-6 weeks and call it done after that.

Today was my son’s first soccer practice of the season. It really doesn’t have anything to do with my transformation but I just wanted to tell you all about my son’s soccer practice. This is going to be his third season playing soccer. He’s not the best player on the team but he’s not the worst either. And as long as he wants to go play I’ll keep taking him over there. He could hardly wait to go for the first practice so we showed up at 5:00 and off he went.

He is playing with kids that are almost a year older than him, U6, when he should be playing in the U5 as he just turned 5 in November but since I really think his coach is great I’ll let him play with the older kids just to stay with his coach. I am very grateful that we ended up on his coach’s team the first season and we got to hang with him. This is his third son he’s coaching and he is really into it. He buys training materials about how to teach young children to play soccer and he keeps the practice very entertaining for the 5 year old boys who have the attention span of a puppy.

And while I was over there at the field I had nothing better to do so I went to do my last run before my race. In previous seasons I’d just sit around and wait for the practice to be over but this season I think I’ll try to get a run in instead of warming the bench. Tomorrow is going to be rest day so I will be in fully rested condition come Saturday morning. The run was pretty short, I only ran 2 miles as all I really wanted to do is get some blood flowing in my muscles but I didn’t really want to wear myself down or heaven forbid injure myself at this point. I ran a bit faster than I probably should have but it really gave me confidence in my ability to make my target of 48 minutes Saturday. I really hope it’ll be a good run.

My son’s coach saw me running and asked if I was going to run in the weekend race at Cowtown. He asked if I was running the Marathon and I told him that I’ll be running the 10K. He said he signed up for the half Marathon and he’d be there too. He also commented on that I must have lost some serious weight as he had not seen me since I embarked on my transformation. It was pretty cool to surprise people like that who have not seen me in such a long time. 50 lbs is 50 lbs any way you look at it. When I told the coach my 5K time from the last race and my goal time for the 10K he thought I should be running a half Marathon instead.

I know I could probably run a half Marathon but I much rather run a great 10K than a half assed half Marathon. I prepared for the 10K, I have trained for the 10K and I am ready for the 10K. I’m sure I could drag my butt through the finish line on a half marathon at this point and I would probably finish in the top half but I have goals that are much bigger than that. And I know that I will run that half marathon when I’m good and ready. And it won’t be for another couple of months before that happens. I actually have trained more for my 10K than coach Steve trained for his half Marathon. His goal is to beat his 1:58 time from last year by at least a minute. If I’ll run a half Marathon I wouldn’t want it to be above 1:40.

Oh and my host just informed me that they have moved my account to a new server! I’m pretty excited about the move as my site seems to be a heck of a lot faster than it was on the old server. Thank you DreamHost! Hopefully you can see the speed difference too. I think I fixed everything that got broken in the move but I can’t guarantee that everything is fully working. I’ll just have to keep an eye on it and hope that everything is 10-4.

And since I’ve been talking about my son and his soccer training here are a couple of pictures of him from last season:

While some people are bathing in the sun and running in shorts we got some massive snow here in Texas. I think we beat the record for most snow within a 24 hour period, I certainly have not seen this much snow in Texas ever. Not being able to run is actually a bit less painful now that I couldn’t really run outside even if I wanted to because the last thing I need is a hip fracture. On a side note my foot is feeling better and better but it’s still not 100% so I’m staying off of it as much as I can and there is still no running in my very near future.

Here is what my street looks like this morning:

And here is a picture of our backyard:

I have to be honest, my WordPress theme is rather embarrassing. It didn’t even support nested comments. Which meant that I couldn’t really value each comment I have received with a worthy response. But all that is changed now. I have played around and added nested comments to my site finally. It took me a while and it might still be broken but at least now I can reply to each and every comment I receive. And I promise that I will do just that. So please leave me a comment, any comment and be sure to check back for your response. I also have a nifty little plugin installed that allows you to get an e-mail of every new comment if you chose so, no spam, I promise!

As for my theme, I’ll work on it some more later to get it more up to date in terms of features.