For those of you have not spent a whole lot of time with us on rides (we highly recommend you join us), you may not have noticed that I've dropped a fair bit of weight the last few months. All of this weight loss can be attributed to my cycling and use of an iPhone app Kari found for us called Lose It!.
Two years ago, when Kari and I met, I had just completed my first marathon, Grandma's Marathon, and I was at my lowest weight since my junior year of high school. I am a fairly big guy, 6'3", and at the time we met, I was weighing around 190 pounds. Running hours a day will help shed weight like nobody's business, but it is not super friendly to the joints. By the end of the summer following my marathon, I was running 5k's in sub-7 minute pace, wicked fast for a non-runner, such as myself, but I also irritated my plantaris in my left knee a little. While this was no serious cause for alarm, I backed off my running significantly.
Around this time, I also trained a kid through his first ever triathlon. He had approached me during my marathon training and asked if I would help him prepare for a triathlon. I said that I would love to as soon as my marathon was done, I do love coaching people through things they believe are impossible and helping them get out of their own way. I told him to pick a race, and that we would train as much as possible together and do the race together. He chose Tri-ing for Children. We had a blast training and racing together. He did very well. He was 57th out of 302. Pretty awesome for a first-timer! My high result was also partly the reason behind why I decided to race again the following weekend at the race where I met my future wife! It is a cute story that may be shared another time. Triathlons definitely do the body good!
Ok, that is enough of a tangent/back story. During the last two years of dating Kari, my weight started to creep up. Until she got a good road bike that we could rely on being available to ride together more often, we did not always work out while we were together. Combine less working out, more eating out (she lives at a distance, so cooking good meals for ourselves can actually be more expensive than just grabbing a quick bit at a restaurant), and the stress from trying to get myself graduated from grad school, did not lead to a very conducive lifestyle to maintain a healthy weight. Needless to say, I ended up ballooning up to the largest I've ever been this last December at around 225-230lbs! Yikes! I knew that riding my bike would help pull it off, so I got really committed to indoor workouts and really pushing them hard.
When April rolled around, I had dropped some of the weight, but I was still tipping the scales at around 212lbs. This is rather large for a cyclist, especially when the road points upward during a race. During my visit to Kari in the last weekend of April, she happened to find the Lose It! application, because she also wanted to cut some weight. We both installed it to our phones and began the process of cutting weight. I set my calorie budget to lose 2 pounds a week and my goal to drop down to 185 pounds, a little smaller than I was at the time of my marathon. That first weekend of use was a little rough. We had never been super disciplined with our food, and now we have a device telling us how much we can eat! Crap!
Over the last 3 and a half months, I have been really disciplined in recording everything I consume and all of my time working out. I try to be as conservative as possible by over-estimating my food and under-estimating my exercise. I have been very impressed with the results. Currently, I am sitting at 186 pounds, so I only have one more to go for my goal weight. It has been going so well, that Brent, Chris and myself think that getting it down to the upper 170s-180 would be good to prep for the few pounds I may gain during Christmas time. I am comfortable racing in the 180-185 range, but it would be nice to be closer to the low end of that before I hit the off season weight training to be able to add muscle where I deem necessary.
I believe this is enough rambling about my diet for now. One word of warning, I do not recommend trying to cut weight while in season. It sucks! On my rest days, my calorie budget is ridiculously low. It is also tough to properly prepare for a race while keeping the calories down. I have found a way to get some decent results this year, but I realize that my results will be better next year because I will not be trying to cut weight. The application also has a maintenance mode, which is a very nice feature. As soon as I call it quits on the weight loss, I can just flip it over into weight maintenance mode and keep recording for that purpose. I have already developed the habit of keeping close tabs on my nutrition, so I might as well keep it up. For those of you interested in joining, Brent, Chris and myself are hitting up Sobelman's as soon as I hit 185 (so some time next week) to celebrate before I continue cutting to 180. Also, both Brent and Chris will be racing this weekend. Brent will be at Race the Lake and Chris will be at Waupaca Area Triathlon. If you find yourself in either of these locales, be sure to cheer them on!
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