I've got a little bit of an update today. I managed to run for 20 minutes straight again. I just slowed down my speed a little bit to 6.0 and it was easy. My heart rate dropped big time, and I just felt better overall. I don't know how well I would have been at adding another five minutes to it yet, but that might be possible soon!

The knee seems fine, but it wasn't quite so fine after last Thursday. I went to my road drills class, and while I wasn't in too much pain in my knee, I could definitely feel something. It was getting worse. I'm not too happy about that. I don't know if I need more time off from riding, or if it's an actual serious problem. Stuipd IT band. Christina offered to find some better stretches when she goes in the office, and I'll see if that helps. It's just that when I do the one I know it doesn't seem to feel like it's stretching anything at all.

My back... well it's not been feeling too nice lately. Right now it's great, but I'm sure it's going to start to stiffen up later today. I'm going to keep an eye on it too. Ugh. I hate getting older.

I've also been wondering about the discrepencies between the different methods I have of measuring calories. It's a HUGE difference. Fitday tells me I burned 285. My iPod tells me I burned 352. My HRM tells me 672. What up with that, g? I forgot to check the machine before I left, but now I'm very curious about what number that one came up with. I want to believe my iPod. That's about 700 an hour for combined run/walk. With my heart rate as high as it was, I'm sure that's very possible.

About freaking time! Not just to be able to make this post, but it's about time I posted anything! Things have been pretty crazy lately, so I'm glad to have a bunch of stuff out of the way again. The magazine is done, and so was the last show I was working at. Can't believe it's been a week and a half since that. It looks like things will be relatively easy for the rest of the month, so I'll finally have some time to update the magazine's site.

Anyway... here's this month's pic:



Not the best comparison, but it seems like the comparative pics don't do much anymore. Maybe I'm just getting used to it.

This last five pounds has definitely been the hardest. I knew it was going to level off after the last five, but I had no idea that it would take this long to get here. It's been hard. With the forty pounds I've dropped so far, my basal metabolic rate has dropped a lot too. Before I was able to eat around 2500 calories to maintain my weight, now I'm down to around 2100.

On the flipside, it also takes me a lot less alcohol to get the same effect. I didn't realize right away, but last Saturday I had a pretty good buzz going on at Sue and Ben's house after only three drinks. I was probably where I would have expected to be after maybe five, so that night got stupid pretty fast. It's going to be hard to adjust to being a relative lightweight.

I've been getting a lot more comfortable like this now. I'm starting to eat regularly again, even though I don't feel like I'm done yet. I'm feeling better about myself all the time. It helps that I'm interacting with people a lot more these days. It wasn't that I felt like ass all the time before, but I never realized how much I really did in retrospect. I actually feel as confident and as good as I did before when I was the same size. It's awesome!

The only issue right now is I'm starting to outshrink my 32 jeans. Not really all that cool, since there is like zero selection in 30. I'd rather not go there. Maybe I'll have to go shopping in Europe instead... at least that entire continent isn't overweight.

Damn... this new Beatles album is hella fun! [yes, I said hella] A Day in the Life just freaked the shit out of me. That's a good sign!

I had a lot more to say about hitting 160. Random thoughts that come into my head when I'm doing something or feeling some way that I didn't before. But now I draw a blank.

The other day I picked up an iPod Nano and the Nike+ iPod kit. Merry Exmass to me! I was considering picking up a Garmin Forerunner 305. I really want one, because I'd like to log all my runs into MotionBased. It'd be great to have everything in one place. But after pricing the pedometer (so I can log treadmill runs), the cadence sensor for my bike and taxes, it would end up costing way too much money. I'm waiting to grab that.

In the meantime, the Nike+ iPod kit looks pretty cool! I've just started playing around with it, and while it doesn't log enough, it's a fun toy. Hrm. I said toy. It's definitely not a very serious way to track enough data, and you can't share it either. Oh well. It'll do for now. It's more about having fun, and for now I really need to make running fun for me. It's still a bit of a task right now. Plus I finally have an iPod that has gapless playback.

I've been having trouble running past 15 minutes at a time. I think it might have to do with how I pumped my speed from 6.0 to 6.2 mph. I'm a stickler for metric conversions. It's not a huge difference, but I think it's enough to force me to run for 15 minutes instead of 20. If I can't do 20 minutes for my next run I'll consider slowing my pace a little bit.

Future plans don't include many more FPiR posts. It's about time to start worrying about other things, like distance, heart rate and body fat percentage. Oh yeah, what's happened with that? It looks like it's gone from a solid 31% to around 22%. Huge jump for sure! That's almost 20 pounds of just fat! But still, that means that I must have lost 20 pounds of muscle too. I'm not so happy about that, and at the same time I don't know if I believe it. I certainly hope I was a higher body fat percentage when I started. It'd be a lot nicer to know I lost 30 pounds of fat instead.

I'm going to shoot for my body fat to be in a healthy range. I'm reading healthy is anywhere between 8-20%. Kinda a big range, eh? Maybe if I shoot for the middle? It's hard to know where to go when the range is so large. I'm sure it'd be nice to be right at the bottom, but I don't know what to expect if I hit that. It's hard to arbitrarily pick a number out of my ass, but I need a goal! Maybe I'll say 155 pounds at 10% body fat? Hell, why not?

This is why it's hard to find the motivation to go to the gym. I really am pretty happy where I am. :)