This winter was a rough one for ol' Clare. In December I got chilblains, which made my toes completely unusable for a full month. That month resulted in a depressing loss of fitness coupled with a depressing gain of weight, which continued to plague me for a couple extra months. And now I find myself in late March, with my big Trifecta weekend looming ten weeks away, carrying about fifteen more pounds than I would like. This is not acceptable. Although I'm not totally hopeless physically, I know that the mileage and the hanging obstacles will be ill-served if I don't lose this weight quickly.
So I'm Getting Serious (capital G and S). This is a multi-prong approach.
1) Calorie deficit. To lose 15 pounds I'll need to have an average calorie deficit of about 800 a day. But I will settle for a 10-lb loss. Every little bit helps.
2) Foot skin endurance. As we know from previous blog posts, blisters have long plagued me, and I need to toughen my feet back up to avoid getting blisters on race weekend.
3) Hand skin endurance. This just got shot to all hell. I stopped going to the ninja gym after our Halloween surge and haven't been back.
How am I tackling these?
1) Diligently tracking my calories and eating filling, healthy meals. My main issue is I was snacking on unnecessary crap, like peanut butter cups and cookies. I can have one for dinner desert. I don't need four as a dessert for my snack (of a bowl of chips).
2) Walking a lot. I plan to do mostly walking until I have lost at least ten pounds. The trifecta weekend will be lots of walking anyway. Worry about running later, when I've hit my goal weight, so that I don't just get discouraging shin splints all the time from my higher weight.
3) Monkey bars. Monkey bars. More monkey bars. I've been doing OCR workouts and including monkey bars until the skin on my hands is barely holding together, then I stop, let them heal for a week, and repeat. As of April 28 I will be "fully vaccinated" (two weeks after second dose), so I'll head back to the ninja gym then!
To kickstart this endeavor, I am currently doing what I call Hell Week. I am exercising 90 minutes a day and consuming under 2000 calories a day. I settled on these numbers because it would get me going with a two-pound loss in one week if my math is correct. It's always good to have a nice loss at the outset to get you motivated.
Can I do this? Absolutely. I am not leaving Ohio without four medals (three race medals and a Trifecta Weekend medal). I will live my Michael Phelps fantasy and bust my ass to get there.
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