Greg's Running Blog

This week was a fantastic week again. Well I’m calling it fantastic but if you care about my strength exercising or my lean body mass retention this week kind of sucked.

The week started out good, I did strength training on Tuesday but I skipped my Friday session. I went to the driving range with my buddy and hit some balls instead. Then I couldn’t go to the gym after work because my son had soccer practice so I was just screwed. This is the second week with a single strength exercise session. It’s getting a bit concerning but I won’t beat myself up over it.

I really don’t think that skipping one strength day has anything to do with it but my lean body mass has shrunk considerably this week. I don’t know if it’s the scale or I’m really losing muscle but the numbers indicate muscle loss. I really don’t want to lose any muscle! I think the muscle loss has more to do with the extra cardio I had been doing thanks to the fantastic running week. I ran 7 days straight with no rest day just as the plan has called for. I managed to put in a total of 29.4 miles ( 47.3 km) this week which is more than I had done before. This number has to climb substantially once I’ll get into marathon training mode though. Luckily the 10K didn’t bother my legs and I feel fully recovered ready to go for next week’s runs.

My eating had been really great this week. Due to the extra cardio I have tried very hard not to eat any less than 1,800 calories and my average shows 1,797.9 for the week. I’m pretty happy with that number. I’m also happy with the 153 grams of average protein intake of the week.

Since I ate 1,798 calories a day and burned 552 calories a day on average it means my net caloric intake was 1,246 calories. According to the rolling average of my weight I had lost 2.6 lbs this week (1.2 kg) which means 9100 calorie deficit in the week which converts into 1300 calories a day. That means my BMR is 2,546 which is significantly higher than last week’s. What this means is that my heart rate monitor underestimates my caloric expenditure or I’m overestimating my caloric intake. I’m betting on the former as I don’t think my metabolic rate jumped 200 calories from one week to the other. I’ll just have to keep an eye on it. 2.6 lbs for the week is pretty steep, maybe I’ll have to start eating around 2,000 calories if I am keeping up with the exercise regime.