New Year -- New Goals

Ok, for a while I thought this blog was dead too. You see, here are the priorities -- spending time with the family, work, training and then at the very bottom of the list is blogging. But here's the deal. When I don't blog about my training most of it doesn't happen.

So here's to a new year, with new goals. Right now I am planning on doing the San Francisco Marathon in July. It's a beautiful city, and I usually visit relatives in the Bay Area in July anyways. The timing seems good for me as well in the sense that spring events (i.e. the LA Marathon or the Big Sur Marathon that one of my friends is doing) are usually foiled by winter illness, and training for a fall event means doing lots of running in the hot, hot August. So there you go. A summer marathon with a few short tri's thrown in for fun. I'm also thinking of doing a time trial series. I have to justify having my TT bike, right?

So the first order of business for me in training for a marathon is dropping some weight. I had some great success a few years ago with DietPower (a calorie counting software), going from 280 to 235. Since then I have fallen off the wagon, and even with lots and lots of training over the last two seasons my weight has hovered around 245-250. Right now it is 240 (I have lost 5 lbs eating junk over the holidays. Go figure.) So I'm back to calorie counting.



Currently I'm at 240 pounds with a body fat percentage around 30%. I want to get that down to a healthy range of around 15%. If I can retain the lean mass that would mean a total body weight of just under 200lbs. So that is my goal, hopefully with lots of run training I can do it before a July marathon.

Now I won't do just calorie counting, I also will focus on eating more Paleo (more meat, veggies and fruit) and less starchy carbs. I have found in the past that I feel better and have less binges when I eat Paleo, but I need the reality check and honesty of the numbers that DietPower provides.

I'll keep you posted.


Really.