Greg's Running Blog

Another week went by and I’m still chugging along. I’m chugging at a slower pace but it’s still in the right direction. And slow, as many other things, is a relative thing.

My diet is looking solid. I’m transitioning into maintenance mode so I’m trying to eat as much food as I would need to maintain a sedentary lifestyle without any running or exercise. This means I should be eating around 2,200 calories a day. My weekly average came in at 2,257 calories which is very close. I’m definitely happy with the number. Protein wise I have averaged 138 grams of protein a day which is another very good number that I’m pleased with. I will stay at this number until I drop the last 6-8 lbs which means I won’t deviate much from it for the next 6-8 weeks probably. Eating 2,300 calories vs. eating 1,800 calories is a big difference. It’s 500 extra calories a day. It means i can be a bit more lenient and have some fruit when I want one or the occasional 100 calories of popcorn or not the healthiest chocolate covered pretzel snacks. It is definitely a diet that is very easy to maintain. It gives me opportunities and possibilities that were very seldom on the tighter 1,800 calorie diet.

Strength training was non-existent again. Since I had my medical procedure done I have taken it easy for a couple of days and on Friday my son had soccer again and I had to bolt. But the real reason is that I’m simply getting a bit lazy with my lunches and instead of going to the gym at work on my lunch break and eating my prepared lunch that I bag from home I tend to go out and have fun with the guys instead. I really need to kick the habit and get back into brown bagging my lunch more often again.

Running was a ton better than I originally anticipated. I was planning on taking the entire week off due to the surgery and maybe run a 3 mile recovery run on Saturday and run a 6 mile longish run on Sunday. Instead I started running Wednesday with an easy 3 miler then did a solid fartlek run on Thursday, another easy 3 miler on Friday, a 30 minute tempo run on Saturday and a fantastic 10 mile long run on Sunday. The 10 mile run was great! I ran it in 1:21:20 which is an 8:08 minute/mile pace which is very good for long runs. It also felt really good and my sensitive knee was gone and the only thing that bothered me was the blister I ended up with on my right foot. I’ve had the mirror image of the blister on my left foot a couple of weeks ago so I’m not entirely surprised. I was running in my new Brooks Ghost 2 which only had about 25 miles on it and I had yet to run more than 6 miles in them before. So the blister was kind of par for the course. All in all I have clocked 27.3 miles (44 km) for the week and burned 3129 calories in the process.

Given my ever climbing caloric intake and my reduced weekly mileage I have only lost 0.9 lbs (0.5 kg) this week which corresponds to a 3,150 weekly calorie deficit. Based on the fact that I burned almost that very amount of calories with my running my BMR is right around the 2,257 calories that I ate. So my goal of eating at maintenance and lose weight through running is working out awesome. I can’t even imagine what I will do in terms of food intake once I hit my target weight and I will have to start maintaining it with 50 miles a week of running. I still have yet to have an above average weight measurement which means I’m still constantly dropping the weight even if the slope of the rate is getting smaller and smaller. I am extremely pleased with this week and I’m hoping for a week just this good for the next one.