Back to basics (and blogging)....

....in which not everything is going to plan.

It's now 4.5 months since I ran Greater Manchester Marathon, and I didn't realise I hadn't written a post since then; they've been quite a busy few months as I was working in Manchester on a contract for 3 of them. 

About 2 weeks into working there I ran Shrewsbury Half Marathon; as I had quite a lot of free time prior to that I was able to do 4 training runs a week. In combination with the GPS watch my wife got me for Christmas, that made a huge positive difference to my training and pace, so I ran it in 1:35:36 (my target was 1:40).

Unfortunately, it turned out that a marshal had sent runners the wrong way so the course was about half a mile short; this was really gutting as I think I'd have been around 1:38 and that would have been a really good time (especially for someone that could barely run a mile at the start of last year).

The Manchester contract has finished now, but it's left its legacy; it's a 1.5 hour commute from here to Manchester (45 minute drive followed by a 45 minute train journey). It turns out that being really tired (both from travelling and work) is not conducive to having willpower to resist snacking in the evenings or maintaining an exercise regime, so for the last 3 months I've been consistently gaining weight most weeks (or at best maintaining or losing a little, only to put more on the next week).

I'm now 1 stone over my target; I haven't really been in my target range since just after Christmas except for the odd week, but this is the heaviest I've been since last year. I'm still much better off than I was at the start of last year, but I don't want to gain any more weight as I want to get back to running, and hopefully get a good time in my next race (I haven't decided what that's going to be yet, but I need to sign up to something to keep me motivated).

So I've decided decided that this week to try to kick start I will go back to basics and stick to the SW plan 100%, and I thought I'd keep a record of what I'm eating here as part of that...so here's today's planned food:

Healthy A: 250ml Semi-skimmed milk

Healthy B: 60g wholemeal roll

Breakfast

Apple, satsuma, nectarine, fat free yoghurt (0 syns) (note: not all fat free yoghurts have no syns, but I checked the ones I had using the app and they are free).

Coffee with milk from HEA.

Second Breakfast (yes, that's a thing)

Bacon (all fat removed) on wholemeal roll (HEB) with fresh tomato (0 syns)

Lunch

Chicken drumsticks (skin removed) with salad (0 syns)

Dinner

Sticky Chicken (~2 syns) with Slimming World chips and salad

Snacks

Pickled Onions (free/speed)

Yoghurt (free)

Speed fruit (strawberries, apples, plums, nectarines)

Exercise ("Body Magic"):

3 Mile run

And the band played on...

...in which I discover the joys of the M25

Well it's not quite true to say I "discovered" it; I have travelled on it before, but it's been a while.  My new contract is in Kent, and initially I need to be down here to gather user requirements and so on, which means driving down on a Sunday evening and leaving early on a Friday (trains are not an option this time, as they're simply too expensive and inconvenient, so I'm hiring a car each week).

In its time the M25 has been called a lot of things.  A 117-mile long car park. A rather pointless waste of public money.  The occult symbol Odegra (see Good Omens).  I prefer a more literal description - it's a horribly long and dull stretch of road on which a large minority of people apparently feel that it's perfectly OK to drive like sub-literate barbarians to whom the words "Highway Code" are a mere collection of syllables; and it is also now the bane of my life, especially on a Friday when it acts as a way of stopping me getting home at a reasonable time.

Anyway, I'm staying with friends down here at the moment, which is nice as it means I have someone to talk to in the evenings and they're looking after me really well.  It's been a bit of adjustment as it's such a long way to come but hopefully within a couple of months I'll be able to alternate between being at home and being down here.

So...running.  Yes.  Um.  Oh look, a flying rhinocerous!  Okay, okay, I admit it, I haven't really done any for the last couple of weeks.  We do have a treadmill at home now (and there's one in the garage here too that I can use) so the weather isn't really a problem, but I'm definitely struggling on the motivation front.  So, more effort definitely required there.  On the plus side I do still seem to be losing a little bit of weight each week which will hopefully make the running easier once I do manage to get back to it.  Which will be soon.  Honest.

Apart from that I'm learning lots of stuff about the new programming stuff from Microsoft, but since a very small percentage of people are likely to have any interest in that I shall skip lightly over it.

Lots has probably happened in the last couple of weeks that I've managed to completely forget, which I shall blame on age.  Or possibly madness.  Or both.

In any case, I shall try to make an effort to blog more - it's been a somehat frantic few weeks but hopefully things will settle down a bit now and I can get on with boring you all.

An ordinary week

In which I get a bit of a nasty shock.  And don't moan about trains at all.

*tap tap*.  Hey, is this thing on?

Bear with me, I have been commanded to go and get the washing in.

Right, back...oh but now I need the loo.  Just hang on a minute there.

Okay, really back properly now.  Maybe I'll just have a quick go on Bejeweled Blitz while I'm composing my thoughts.

Now I really am back.  This week's been a bit ordinary really, not much to tell you about.  I can't moan about the journey, which was fine in both directions,  although the train home was just as crowded as usual - I was just lucky enough to get a seat for once.

So, the boring stuff that the blog is actually about first - I've run a couple of times this week, both fairly short runs as nobody from work was out running this week and I tend not to run very far when I'm by myself because I don't know my way around well enough so I'd just get lost, which I have done on a number of occasions.  According to MapMyRun.com the route I followed is 3.84KM, which isn't too bad I guess.  I did struggle a bit on Tuesday because I hadn't run at all over the weekend, so that's a lesson learnt - I was fine when I did it on Thursday though.


I went out for a chinese in one of the local restaurants with a friend from work on Wednesday.  We'd been to this particular restaurant before so we ordered 3 dishes each (the food is good, but a bit insubstantial).  Eating with chopsticks is something that it's going to take me a long, long time to get used to but at least it means I eat slowly (I'm usually sitting with an empty plate long before anybody else's is even half empty).


I had Tom Yum chicken, which I'm pretty sure is a made up name.  It's basically chicken and onions in what tastes like spicy tomato soup.  At least it comes with a china spoon thingy so you don't have to eat the soup with chopsticks.  I discovered during the course of the evening that I've been pronouncing the word "Szechuan" wrong for years, too.  I think we'll just skip lightly over that.

So, I'm sure you're waiting for me to stop prattling on and tell you what the bit of a shock referred to in the subtitle was.  Somebody brought in some extra-super-posh scales this week, which measure all kinds of stuff by sending electrical pulses through you then making educated guesses (I think).  We all took turns on them, and when it came to mine...well, there's no nice way to say it.  I was expecting the weight (which was bad but is getting better, slowly), but it also works out stuff like Visceral Index (how much fat you have around your organs - mine was 11 which is defnitely on the high side) and um...metabolic age.  Mine was 11 years older than it should be, which is a Very Bad Thing (the only other person whos metabolic age was as high as mine really is that age).


If it had just been me I might not have been too bothered, after all it's probably not that accurate...but everybody else went on them and they were all much much better than mine (except the manager, but at least he was a good 10 pounds lighter than me), and since they are all pretty fit it seems likely that the things are reasonably accurate.


So, something must be done.  I'm already eating healthily...well, most of the time, and running around 4k every other day, but there's one meal each day that is, at the moment, distinctly unhealthy.  So, really, there's only one thing to give.  This is not a decision I want to make, but it has to be done.  'tis better to have scoffed and lost than never to have scoffed at all, and all that...


The full English breakfasts have to go.  Bye bye, bacon.  Elveda, egg.  So long, sausage.   Bye beans.  Toodle-oo, tomato.  And finally, the greatest sacrifice of all, the thing that I will miss more than all the rest...I must say farewell, arrivederci and adieu to the mushrooms.  Oh, the mushrooms...won't somebody think of the mushrooms!


Well, there's no avoiding it.  If I'm going to run 13 miles in anything like a reasonable time (under 2 hours is my goal, at the moment) then my lifestyle has to change; that was part of the point of all this, after all.  Nobody said it would be easy.


Maybe I can get away with just one fried breakfast a week...