Being Hardcore

I might not have been keeping you perfectly up-to-date on my workouts, but I can assure you that they're getting done and I'm actually glad to be back at it.  I'm sticking with my plan of working out 6 days a week and having one rest day.  I've also been working on keeping my eating in check, which is a little bit easier when you're not on an extended vacation at Drew's mom and dad's house where they keep feeding you delicious food all the time! 

I've decided to try to keep up my new (and slightly improved) eating habits until April.  My goal between now and then is to lose 15 pounds.  Or, technically, 12, since I think I'm already down 3.  In April we're going to San Francisco and going to the Giants opening day and then on to wine country for 5 days and I want to be able to do wine tastings and eat yummy vacation food without worrying about anything else! 

I'm eating probably 85-90% of what I was eating a week ago, but this time I'm counting calories (using Daily Burn).  I've used a couple of Basal Metabolic Calculators to figure out that my BMR is probably somewhere around 1475 calories a day, so my calorie goal is to eat more than that and is somewhere in the 1500-1700 range each day.  I've successfully done this for the past 4 days and I have no reason to think that today would be any different.  I don't feel like I've denied myself anything, I just don't need to eat as often as I was when I was training for a marathon and I got sort-of used to the extra food! 

The good news for me is that I eat pretty well no matter what.  Now I'll just be a bit more tempted to cook at home (which, if you saw our counter space, you'd wonder how anything was possible) and have leftovers for lunch than I will to go grab something at the myriad of options within a 2 minute range from my desk.  But, that will be good for my wallet as well! 

Drew and I have called what we're doing (because he's in on this, too) until April "being hardcore".  This involves me actually getting up and going to the gym, which is a huge change of pace for me over the last month or so.  I think I'm doing pretty well so far.  Here's the quick breakdowns of all the workouts:

Saturday, January 8
Drew and I went to our "old" gym.  It's the one I was used to going to and it has a pool, which is nice, since not all gyms in NYC have one.  However, it's been undergoing renovations for the past couple months, so we haven't been going there (or, really, I should say that Drew hasn't been going there).  I wanted to go and see how everything looked.  It seems like they're still about a month away from being completely done, but it's looking pretty nice so far.  Of course, I should mention that the equipment hasn't changed and Drew managed to break a treadmill while we were there, so it looks fancier, but I'm not entirely sure it is fancier. 

I started out on the elliptical to warm-up before heading to the treadmill.  I only did two miles on the treadmill before going to do some weight-lifting.  I feel like these gym workouts are a little scattered because I don't do any one thing for very long, but if this is what it's going to take to get me to keep going, so be it.  I finished up the weight lifting with some ab work before going back to the treadmill for another round of cardio.  I was going to try to do some intervals on the treadmill the second time around, but after the first one, I felt really pukey.  I could have lived through that if I hadn't gotten a big side stitch.  I took that as a sign that I should ease back into this whole thing and so I spent 15 minutes doing some stretching and more ab work.  All in all, a pretty good workout for the first day of being "hardcore". 

Sunday, January 9
In my original plan, I had wanted to run three days a week, so I figured I might as well start now!  I've got this Speedy 5K plan in my head for March and I thought that I'd try to incorporate a little speed work into my run today since it hadn't worked out so well the day before.  I put on lots of warm clothes and a hat and gloves and my new Garmin and headed out the door to the Westside Path.

Wow.  It's cold out there in January.  Luckily, it didn't take me too long to warm-up.  I ran two miles down to Chelsea Piers and then turned around and headed back home.  I figured that my muscles were probably warmer now so I could try to run a faster mile for mile three.  And I totally did!  It was pretty hard, though.  I also think I need to change some of the settings on my Garmin because right now I have the auto pause feature for when I'm totally stopped.  I had to stop a couple times today to blow my nose and I noticed that each time, it took at least 10 seconds to register that I'd stopped.  I can't really blame it, I'll just change some setting and then I'll feel better about my times not being skewed by nose blowing or stopping for a traffic light.  But, I can include these fancy mile splits for the very first time:

Mile 1:         10:17
Mile 2:         10:28
Mile 3:           9:36
Mile 4:         11:02
Mile 4-4.10:  1:14

Monday, January 10
Rest day!  Mondays are going to be my "normal" rest day, so I figured I should just go ahead and get into the routine early! 

Tuesday, January 11
This morning I managed to get up and out of bed, even though Drew said "you could just go after work", but I wanted to make sure my workout was done and over with.  My left calf muscle has been a little sore, which I'm sure is the result of running too fast (oops).  That meant that I wouldn't be doing any running today.  Instead, I did 30 minutes on the stair mill and 30 minutes on the elliptical.  Not a riveting workout, but a workout nonetheless.  And I feel great about it.  Mostly I felt great that I'm still sticking with it.  It's a lot easier to get up and go to the gym at 9 or 10 on the weekend than it is before 6 on a weekday! 

Tomorrow it will likely have to be after work unless we end up with another huge snow accumulation in NYC tonight/tomorrow morning.  I am planning on a dentist appointment at 8 am before work and since the gym doesn't open until 6 and there should be a lot of snow on the ground, which would make working out outdoors dangerous, I think I'll stick with the after work option! 

Saturday
Elliptical: 15:25 / 1.25 miles / 145 calories / 179 max HR (84%) / 172 avg HR (81%)
Running (Treadmill): 20:49 / 2.00 miles / 200 calories / 198 max HR (93%) / 180 avg HR (85%)
Weight Lifting: 22:24 / 155 calories / 166 max HR (78%) / 143 avg HR (67%)
Running (Treadmill) 2: 10:00 / 1.00 mile / 93 calories / 181 max HR (85%) / 172 avg HR (81%)

Sunday
Running: 42:37 / 10:23 pace / 481 calories / 192 max HR / 173 avg HR

Tuesday
Stair Mill: 30:48 / 2.53 miles / 245 calories / 166 max HR (78%) / 155 avg HR (73%)
Elliptical: 31:40 / 2.75 miles / 270 calories / 172 max HR (81%) / 162 avg HR (76%)