How time flies! It’s been 45 days since my last post. Where to begin?

I’ve definitely been outside training a lot more. Mostly running, but doing some stairs as well. There is a flight of 50 stairs in a row that I’ve been going to and will run up and down wearing a weighted vest. But mostly I’ve been jogging.

Now that it’s nice out, it’s been hard to want to go into the gym, though I’m sure the weight lifting and other varieties of cardio would be beneficial.

I went on a 3 vacation to Las Vegas in there and managed to make time for 1 work out. I figure the miles and miles of walking I did the other 2 days counted as exercise enough.

Milestone 1:

Last week, I felt fresh enough to try running the longest I’ve ever ran. I managed to run my first 10k and it felt great. During the run I even ran my fasted mile on mile 5 which is really crazy. I actually was speeding up on the back half. It was the middle 2 miles where I was afraid I wouldn’t have enough juice left in the tank if I didn’t slow down a bit. I ended with a time of 57:18. I ran a bit extra just because I wanted to make dang sure I hit 10 kilometers on the GPS.

Milestone 2:
After losing 15 lbs, I’ve been struggling to break 225 lbs, but yesterday I finally slipped under it at 223. I ate dinner and promptly popped back over it, but at least I have the potential to start moving down again.

Last week I finally was able to go buy a new bike so that is yet another way for me to mix up my exercise routine. This morning, I rode it to work and celebrated with the video below. I’ll be testing out more gear in the coming weeks because we are down to less than 2 months until all of this comes to a head and I tackle the mountain so be looking for more videos and posts coming soon.

This is just a quick post because I’ve hit 3 milestones today. The 1st is that I’ve been officially training for 50 days. It doesn’t seem like it has been that long. I kind of feel like I should be further along with my preparations by now, but this winter has just been so snowy and cold (the snowiest on record in Nebraska) that I haven’t been able to get outside for what I need to do. I’ll have to do some catching up when the warmer weather comes and the flooding we’re experiencing now ebbs.

The 2nd milestone is that I’ve lost 10 pounds finally. Again, I feel like I should be further along than that. I’ve been building the muscles in my legs pretty heavily so I know that affects things, but I hoped it would be closer to 15 lbs. by now. I am eating much healthier, but still consuming about 300 calories too much each day. I’m going to try to do more meal planning to help reduce random snack attacks, especially at night.

The 3rd is that I’ve gotten myself back up to running 3 miles non-stop. My mile pace is still kind of slow at an average 9:45, but at least I’ve gotten my endurance up. 2 years ago when I was running 5 days a week, the longest I ever ran was 3.1 miles. I did it a lot faster back then, averaging 8:30, but never made it further than that. I feel like I could have gone further than 3 miles today so that means my leg training is paying off.

Yesterday I started doing work outs again with a weighted backpack. I did my normal Stair Stepper workout wearing a 23 lb backpack. I adjusted the weight accordingly on the machine so my legs didn’t feel the difference much, but I noticed my feet had to work much harder to keep myself balanced. It’ll be good to keep doing a backpack work out each week to get used to it.

To conclude this post with some humor, when I was running today, it started raining. My shirt was clingy and you know what that means, chafing nipples! I’m pretty sure I rubbed off the top layer of skin. It’s Neosporin and a shirtless night for me.

Mountain Training - Day 106 - Bike Riding and 2 milestones

Mountain Training - Day 50 - Milestones