The First 100 Pounds (41 - 50)

The standard warnings still apply: I'm still not a medical professional, and I don't pretend that this is some sort of program. It's what I did, what I do, and what has worked for me. It doesn't even necessarily make sense. Your mileage may vary, and your doctor should have a say in the matter. What the hell do I know about this? I'm a poet, people. Get professional advice.

I also want to remind you (and myself) that some of these realizations/developments/changes were 16 months or more in the making. Process, process, process.

If you want to start from the beginning, you can do so here. Here are 41 – 50:

41. I COUNT

Remember yesterday's post when I said that sometimes I have to count off quarter miles to keep myself going? I do that kind of thing all the time to keep my brain occupied. I check my math and figure out how long it will take me to finish (or get halfway, or get through the mile…whatever it takes). If I have to, I count down the minutes. Much like I know I can run five miles, I also know I can run for a very long time. Sometimes, I have to tell myself that I'll be all right if I can make it to a certain point—an hour from the finish, half an hour from the finish, five minutes from the finish.  Most days, it's not an issue.

42. I TRACK MY NUMBERS

I don't do a lot with this, although I'm thinking about buying myself a running journal. I just have a small notebook, and I jot down the date, the approximate calorie burn, the duration of my workout, the distance, whether it was walking or running, and, for treadmill workouts, my highest speed and incline. If I also did some yoga, strength training, or a significant amount of other activity (like a day of yard work or hauling a ton of pellet fuel into the shed, for example), I'll note that, too. It takes way longer to explain than to do. Each week gets its own page, and at the bottom of the page I add up the calories and the miles run and walked (I track running and walking numbers separately). At the top of the next page, I write the year and the total miles run and walked since January 1. I also note how far ahead of my yearlong running goal I am, a figure that started as a negative number. The day my yearlong goal number went positive was a very happy day. I'll also put little happy faces or some other notation if I exceed expectations in some way—faster than usual, farther than usual, etc.

I want to make it clear that calorie counts are almost totally arbitrary—no two calorie counters online figure the burn in the same way, and the burn is affected by all sorts of different things, like weight and muscle-to-fat ratio. When I was at my top weight, I was burning more calories than the readout on the treadmill claimed. Right now it's pretty close to accurate, but twenty pounds from now it will be too high. It doesn't matter. I use the calorie count as a guideline—it's an obvious, clear indicator of progress. If the weekly number was 3,500 a couple of months ago and it's 6,000 this week, that's one more piece of data I can use when I need to give myself a pep talk.

43. I MAKE VERY SMALL GOALS

This is not unrelated to being patient, and similarly not unrelated to how much I count. My weight loss goals are five-pound increments (and are not tied into a specific time frame—I just like numbers that end in five and zero, and it's easy for me to keep track of them). My mileage goals, for a long time, consisted of increasing my weekly mileage by a mile at a time. That's right—one mile per week, and not every week. I increase my medium-run speed by maybe twenty or thirty seconds per mile at a time, and then I'll stick to that speed until it starts to feel too comfortable (often  months). My long runs are slower, and the speed on those increases even more slowly. It can feel tedious at the time, but when I look back, I can see that I've cut almost 2 ½ minutes off my medium-run mile and a minute and forty-five seconds (or thereabouts) off my long-run mile. Over the course of a single year—especially when I remember that at the beginning of that year, I could only run for a minute at a time—that's pretty impressive.

44. I PUT BIG GOALS OUT OF MY MIND

The thing is, if I started this process by saying that my goal was to increase my speed by as much as I have, or to lose 140 pounds, or even this first hundred, I would never—not in a million years—have made it even this far. I mean seriously. One hundred and forty pounds was close to half my weight. It's an entire person. I can't think about that sort of thing all the time. That is, I can, but I try not to allow myself to. It's self-defeating. But there's another thing I do.

45. I KEEP BIG GOALS IN MY MIND

I do know where I want to be. I know what I want to weigh, how I want my clothes to fit. But mostly, I know how strong I have become, and that I want to hold onto that strength. I want to keep improving on that strength. I want to find new challenges and beat my goals into the ground. It's fun, and it makes me feel mighty, and I like to feel mighty. RAAAAAAR!

46. I REEVALUATE MY GOALS

You know how just now I was saying that I made both big and small goals? The other part of that is evaluating those goals, and then evaluating them again. For example, my big goal for 2013 is to run 750 miles and walk 250 during the year. The walking goal is a piece of cake, and I knew it when I set it—I deliberately set a goal that I knew I could blow out of the water, and I attached it to the bigger, more meaningful running goal by making the total miles come out to a nice, even number: 1,000 miles on my feet sounds pretty, right? But the running goal is tougher: it requires fifteen miles a week from me (with a couple of weeks off for injury/illness/scheduling built in as a buffer), and when I set that goal, I was only running about ten or twelve miles a week. Ambitious, but do-able, I thought.

And here it is the end of June, and for the past two weeks, I've run thirty miles. I'm more than 100 miles above where I should be to hit my goal of 750, and I passed 250 walking miles last week, and we're not quite halfway through the year. Also, I'm running twice as much weekly mileage as I need to, so I'll surpass the running goal as well—barring injury—sometime in late summer/early fall. In my head, I've set new goals (1,000 miles running and 500 miles walking), both of which are totally manageable. I haven't made them official, even to myself, but they're there, so much so that I realized while editing this post that my discussion of the original goals was all in past tense. Whoops. Yes, I've done the math and know how many miles I need to run and walk every week to make the new goals. But my original stated goals stand. It would be easy for me to keep increasing my goals until I get to ones that are unrealistic, and that would allow me to quit. So the original goals stay.

I've added new ones, though: goals for increasing speed, for doing more speed work and other directed workouts, for increasing my upper body strength. Even though we're only halfway through the year, I'm starting to think about goals for 2014—what a reasonable mileage goal is, what other goals I might have.

I try not to make goals that are out of my control. I don't have a goal to lose a certain amount of weight by a certain time, because while there are some things I can control, like my diet and exercise, my weight is also affected by factors like hormonal shifts, muscle-to-fat ratio, and salt intake. Similarly, I don't have a goal to be a certain size within a certain amount of time. My goals are health-related, not size-related. If I knew how I learned to be satisfied with goals like that, I would tell you. But I don't.

Finally, I'll reevaluate my goals should my current goals no longer be realistic. If, say, I'm in some sort of accident and break my leg, my goals are going to have to shift to ones that support my healing and regaining strength during recovery. If I break my leg the day before the run that was going to put me over the 750 mile mark, it's not going to do anybody any good if I beat myself up over my inability to meet that goal. I'll mourn, I'm sure, and be really pissed off, and then I'll regroup and move on.

47. I HAVE A TRAINING PLAN.

I started with this C25K plan, then, when it became clear that I wasn't doing a very good job of setting my own goals, this half-marathon plan. Now that I've been at this a while, I feel comfortable adapting a plan to fit my own needs, but I always have something to strive for. It's usually a series of smaller goals inside a larger, more long-term goal (like increasing my long run weekly while I train for a half-marathon), but there's always something going on. At the moment, I'm pretty happy with a long run between ten and twelve miles, so I'm adding a mile here and there to my medium runs and working on speed—I alternate weeks between adding miles and adding speed work. I probably need to register for a race to keep myself focused.

48. I OBSESS A LITTLE

I have to be careful about this, because I tend toward the obsessive as it is. But I find it helpful to run through my game plan for the week as I'm getting ready to fall asleep—what's worked for me so far? What does the rest of my week hold? What new little goals might I want to set? I make Jed (and too many other people) feel how strong my quads are. I'm making this list. I'M BORING AS HELL ABOUT IT. It keeps me on track.

49. I MAKE PREDICTIONS

I think about where I want to be in a month or six months. I think about how I'll feel when I hit a goal (like these 100 pounds). If I'm on the treadmill, I do the mental math to see how far along I'll be at the end of an episode of whatever I'm watching. I play games with myself to pass the time on the long runs. I try not to get hung up on whether I make these—temporary, pointless—goals or not. I just make them and see if they come to fruition. Am I right about how far along I'll be after 20 minutes? No? Okay, then, where will I be after the next 20 minutes? Maybe it's practice for adjusting my real goals as my body strengthens. Maybe it's just a distraction. It doesn't much matter. It keeps me entertained.

50. I COMPARE MYSELF TO LAST YEAR

Or last month. Or last week. Whatever it takes. I have weeks where I'm at a specific weight, often a couple of pounds higher than the lowest I've managed, and I just hang out there. Once, I stayed there for more than two weeks. It didn't matter if I ate nothing or everything. It didn't matter if I worked harder or eased off. For whatever reason, my weight was just where it was. And I got through those two weeks by reminding myself how far I've come. Sometimes I can calm my emotions down with intellectual knowledge. Look, I can say. Look at this evidence of how much you don't suck. Understanding something intellectually and understanding it emotionally are often two very different animals—if I can use facts to make the animals talk to each other, I usually end up in better shape all around.