November miles

Racked up 62.5 miles during the month of November. Was kinda aiming for 80, but I forgot about my training plan tapering me coming up to my 10k.

Ward Parkway Thanksgiving Day Run

I ran my first ever 10k ever Thursday morning!

It was the Ward Parkway Thanksgiving Day run.

I had a blast.

I really wanted to break an hour and I came so close! My official time was 1:00:40!

Here's the start, I'm in there somewhere!

Finished! I really pushed it there at the end.

Here's the official results.

Every finisher of this race gets a pie. I ate it all in one sitting. HaHa! It was good!

It was such a great day. I was whipped all the rest of the day. I was really thankful I thought to bring my foam roller along.

Last night while I was playing around online, I got an email from the Garmin Marathon offering me a sweet discount because I've been saying nice things about them on Twitter. So now it's official, I registered to run my first ever half-marathon this April!

Oh boy what have I got myself into now? Haha!

An interesting phenomenon

I've noticed an interesting thing lately.

This past year and a half I've lost quite a bit of weight, more than 80 pounds at this point.

I am just now into the top of the range that a doctor would consider an acceptable weight for my body. I still measure between 16 and 19 percent body fat, which is higher than I'd like. I'm aiming for 10 percent, and according to the charts that will leave me at about 140 pounds.

The point being I am still about 40 pounds away from being underweight.

Now I've been getting the deprecating remarks about my weight loss for a while now, "You're not the man you used to be,"  or "He's a shadow of his former self." But because of the laughing manner in which they're delivered I'd always assumed they were actually compliments.

But in the last week I've had two separate people express concern for my well-being because of how much weight I've lost. And that's had me rethinking those supposed compliments from before.

When I ballooned from 200-260 over the course of a summer about six years ago, there was only one guy who said anything about my increased weight. In fact thinking back through my life my weight has fluctuated quiet a bit. And the only time I can remember anyone expressing concern was when I was losing pounds.

Most everybody says they believe being overweight is unhealthy. But perhaps that's just another of the myriad things I've discovered people say but don't really truly believe.

Garmin training plan

I can't believe it's been 11 weeks since I hung these calendars on my wall.

One of my goals for this year was to be able to run 10 kilometers distance, but I made kind of a snap decision at the very last minute to run an actual 10k race.

And here I am about a week away from race day! And I'm getting very excited.

My life had a little bit of a shake up last week in the career department. And that's going to screw up my plans just a little but everything should be OK.

I am very happy with the free training plan from Garmin.

I can see a marked improvement in my fitness. Being able to see the improvement in the heart rate and pace data collected by my watch makes a big difference. Without that data I'm not sure I'd feel like I was improving.

How to stay safe running in the dark

Here's a little video I made showing off some of the things I use to stay safe running on the roads in the dark.

October miles

I got in a great 77.8 miles in the month of October. Even counting taking it easy for several days with a hamstring issue. 

In other news, only three weeks to go till my first ever 10k race!