14 Miles!

I plan one distance run per week in preparation for the half marathon in February.  This week, I wanted to do it on Monday, but it was raining. I’m not so hardcore that I believe in running for hours in wet sneakers, wet clothes that will chafe, and wet hair that will be a tangle of knots by the time I get home.  So I planned it for Tuesday, but then my youngest stepdaughter called and invited us to her patriotic show at her elementary school.  We went to that, and it was wonderful!  So my distance run ended up being last night.

I was so sleepy, I could have curled up on the couch and dozed off when I got home from work.  I made myself change clothes, lace up, and head out the door.  I purposely chose a course with hills, since I have read that the half marathon course has hills (what sadistic bastard thought that up?), and I want to know I can handle hills even when I’m tired.

Well, I certainly had the chance to test that out last night!  The stretch of road that I chose was full of hills.  I definitely felt them.  So did my knees.  But I made it: I ran 14 miles!  That is  the longest I have ever run.  I was nearly hobbling when I got done, and I had to stretch repeatedly afterward, but I survived.

As I was closing in on 14 miles, I was nearly bursting with pride.  I even thought of my blog posts about my chin and about not looking good in that picture, and I thought, who the hell cares? Can most people with perfectly smooth chins run 14 miles?  Can all of the most photogenic people on the planet run 14 miles?  I nearly laughed out loud while I was running at how silly I had been, criticizing how I look when this poor body was capable of so much, and I didn’t even know it.

Last night’s run taught me something else: it’s definitely time for some new running shoes!  My feet were throbbing last night.  I’m finally going to treat myself to a professional fitting at a running store, one of those places that watch you run in the store, test your gait, and select a shoe based on your running form.  It’s going to be far more expensive than the $40 discount shoe store sneakers I’ve been running in, but I bet it will make a huge difference in how I feel during and after a long run.

You know, I wouldn’t mind at all if the running store recommends a little something like this:

I would probably trip trying to run and watch my totally awesome running shoes at the same time 🙂

Yo-Yo

This is not my first weight loss rodeo.  I have yo-yo’d from as low as the 120’s all the way up to 211 pounds.  I reached goal weight a few years ago, gained it back rapidly, and have gotten close again before gaining it all again, several times.

Something I have noticed that is different this time around: no one is mentioning my weight loss. Before, when I had lost 20 pounds or so, my boss and co-workers complimented me on losing weight.  I’ve lost 46 pounds now, and no one has said anything.  Not a peep.

The only person who has complimented my weight loss is my boyfriend.  I think I know why.  No one else expects me to keep it off.  They’ve seen me drop weight before, then *blink*, get fat again seemingly overnight.  So they have seen this before, already think they know what to expect, and are just waiting for me to puff up like a blowfish again.

Except it’s not going to happen.  Not this time.  Sure, I’ve said that before, but I feel different this time.  It is harder this time to lose the weight, so I know that gaining it back will be a huge mistake and taking a risk that I may never lose it again.

I also have a plan for maintenance, which I never bothered to do before.  I am stealing an idea from Take Off Pounds Sensibly (TOPS), a weight loss group I used to belong to.  When someone reaches goal weight, they then have a weight range they must stay in.  If they weigh in over that range, they are on probation and have a limited time to get back into the goal weight range.  So I’m going to set a goal weight range, probably around 132-137, and keep weighing in each week to make sure I am staying in that range.  If I drift above it, I will give myself two weeks, tops, to get back into my goal weight range.

And then there are people like Psycho, who were tickled pink that I gained the weight back, and are smugly waiting for me to gain it back again.  Someone commented to me that in the past, when I have lost weight, Psycho has frantically tried to keep up by losing weight too.  This time she has not. I assume, again, it’s because she is just waiting for me to fall apart and get fat again.

It bothers me that so many people don’t believe I can do this.  But I believe I can.  And I will. It will be fun proving them wrong, and proving to myself what I can do.

Just Not There Yet

Has it really been two weeks since I’ve posted anything here?  Nothing horrible has happened; I just lost track of time.  A lot going on, not enough time to devote to everything.

This past Saturday’s weigh-in was a good one: down 2 more pounds.  This week I need to stay on top of my game!  I have no wiggle room.  I have to weigh in a day early, Friday morning, since my boyfriend and I are going out of town.  This is our first trip together, just the two of us, no kids, in over two years, so I’m looking forward to it.  We hardly ever treat ourselves like this, so I intend to enjoy it to the hilt.

I have now lost 46 pounds, and I am proud of that.  But this past weekend, when we took the kids to the fair, we had our picture taken all together. When I saw the picture, I felt so disappointed.  I’ve lost 46 pounds, and I still look like that?  I felt thin that day.  I felt like I looked great.  Then I saw that picture, saw how fat my arms look, my chipmunk cheeks, and I felt like a huge whale again.

It’s been hard to push past that disappointment.  I rationalized with myself: look, I’ve lost 46 pounds, but I still have nearly 30 pounds to go.  A person who is 30 pounds overweight is not going to look thin in a picture, no matter how much weight she has lost!  So, I ‘ve come a long way, but I still have a long way to go.  I’m not there yet.  It’s not fair to expect myself to look skinny in pictures when I still have quite a bit of weight to lose.

I told myself I was being stupid about that picture.  I need to just keep going, keep working hard, and 30 pounds from now, I will love how I look in pictures.  I’m just not there yet.

Mini-Goal, DVD, and Facebook

I was looking forward to weigh-in Saturday morning, because I thought for sure, the week I ran half-marathon distance, I must have torched some serious pounds!  I stepped onto the scale, eager to see the number.

169.0

On one hand, that was awesome.  My mini-goal was hitting the 160’s, and I did it!  I lost 2 pounds since last week.  I should have been excited, right?

But I wasn’t.  Two pounds?  After running over 13 miles?  I felt cheated and disappointed.  I’m not sure exactly what I expected, just more than that.

Two pounds is still two pounds in the right direction and two pounds closer to my goal.  My reward for reaching the 160’s is this workout DVD:

I love Cathe Friedrich, and this weight-training DVD got really good reviews.  Her DVD’s tend to cost a bit more (this one was over $20), but I have found they are well worth it.  I will review it after I receive it and try it out.
This past weekend, my stepkids were home with us.  My 13-year-old stepson told me he saw my post on Facebook about running over 13 miles, and he congratulated me and said, “I liked it on Facebook because you said you had been trying to reach that distance for a long time.”  I loved that he was proud of me.  It meant so much to me.
But…I had checked that post to see who had liked it, and his name wasn’t on that list.  I checked again, thinking I had just missed it, but nope, it wasn’t there.  Well, he certainly didn’t lie about liking it, and he had obviously seen it because he knew I had mentioned it being a goal of mine for a long time.  There is only one possible explanation: after he liked it, his biological mother, Psycho, logged in as him and un-liked it.
I just shook my head.  Yes, that is definitely something she would do, as sad and pathetic as it is.  My stepson liking something I wrote about my fitness achievements would have sent her into a jealous spiral of rage.  Well, let her be jealous.  That’s her prerogative.  My stepson knows what I achieved, and he is proud of me, and she can’t change that!

Thirteen Point One!

I went for a run yesterday evening, determined to not only burn off those McDonald’s french fries (delicious little golden-fried temptresses), but to reach 10 miles.  I don’t know what magically came together to give me a good run, but I felt strong.  I love runs like that, the few and far between runs when I feel good, nothing hurts, and I have energy to burn.

As I neared 10 miles, I started thinking about pushing for 11.  When I hit that and still felt good, I went for 12.  When I hit 12, I was too damn close to that magical 13.1 number, the half-marathon number, to stop!  So I kept going.

My quadriceps groaned and complained the last 2 miles, but I just kept thinking that I had come too far not to go for it.  Hey, otherwise I had to start all over again at mile 1, so why not just keep going from mile 12?  Logical, no?

When Runkeeper announced I had reached 13 miles, I dug my phone out of my arm band so I could count down and watch the distance turn to 13.1.  Just for kicks, I let it turn to 13.2, then finally slowed to a walk for my cool-down.

Yesssss!  I have been trying since May 2014, when I first took up running again, to reach 13.1 miles. I got sooooo close last summer: I hit 12 miles sometime during the summer.  Then I slacked off, stopped running, and gained a ton of weight.  I started running again in June of this year, when I made the commitment to lose this weight once and for all.

I still can hardly believe I finally reached the half-marathon distance.  The first thing I did this morning was shop online for one of those coveted 13.1 stickers for my car!  I still intend to run a formal half marathon, but Runkeeper proves that I am officially a half-marathoner now, so I want my sticker.  I will get the bling (the medal) in a few months when I run a local half marathon.  I just need to stay consistent so I can be sure to get that medal too!

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