Greg's Running Blog

Another week has gone by and I have to give a status update. Well I don’t have to but I choose to. This week was all about running and eating right.

The running went great. I have managed to put in 23.6 miles this week which is pretty much according to plan. I’m doing a 10K race in 4 weeks so I need to be in tip top shape by then. For some folks 24 miles a week would seem a lot for others it might seem like nothing. For me it’s just the right amount. I’ll have to build up to higher miles if I ever plan on running longer races but for 10K it is perfect mileage. Friday was a rest day so I didn’t run. I didn’t do anything on Friday actually. It felt kind of weird but I’m sure my body thanked me for it.

Strength training is still an integral part of my transformation but I’m cutting it down to twice a week and I hit two areas every time. I do both back/biceps and chest/triceps on both days. This helps me with having more time for running during the week yet I still work out both major areas twice a week. I have been slacking on the core and legs but the running is definitely helping the legs. I’m really worried about losing the muscle mass I have and I really need to keep doing strength training. Strength training just can’t really take a back seat yet. I’ll report back on how the twice a week thing working out for me.

Nutrition is still the toughest part of my transformation triangle. Cardio is down, strength training is coming along but with food it’s a struggle and constant challenge. It is a constant challenge to find the right amount of calories and the right combination so I still eat enough protein. The hardest thing has been moving up from 1,4000 calories to 1,800 calories. I have a hard time with adjusting my foods to spread the calories out and not end up eating junk. At breakfast I’ll think that I can eat more since I need to bump the calories so I do. Then I figure now that I need 400 extra calories I can have a morning snack and I eat another 200 calories worth of stuff. Then I bump up the rice on my lunch and by the time I go home and add it all up I realize that my dinner has to be pretty slim to squeeze in under the calorie limit. And then I realize that we’re out of chicken and the only thing left is some fatty ground beef that will put me over the calories with the fat but it will keep me from hitting the protein level I want to hit. Maybe 400 calorie difference is not that much and I really should only spread it amongst my breakfast and morning snack and still have the same lunch and dinner like I did on 1,400 calories.

Having said all that my diet has still been pretty spot on, I came in at 1,739 calories on average for the week with 159 grams of daily protein. I guess the above paragraph is more of a train of thought I have to go through every day to be able to hit my targets. I still lost some lean mass this week according to my scale but I hope that the drop will stop by next week.

Another thing you will notice is the change in the look of the charts. Since I no longer do daily entries on nutrition and cardio it has become very difficult for me to enter all the required data to generate the charts dynamically via WordPress and the Google charting API. So I started using Excel to do my charts instead. I’ve been logging my information in Excel all along so all I had to do was generate the charts from it. You must agree that the new charts look a lot better and they give me a lot more options to tweak and set up the way I want them. I can include macronutrient distribution on the calorie chart and rolling averages for my weight, body fat percent and waist line charts. This will help me pinpoint trends better and filter out daily fluctuations. I’m also adding two more charts, one for lean body mass and one for distance ran. I’ll keep the lean body mass chart on until I get that thing under control and the mileage meter will get pretty impressive by October if I say so myself .