Coasting

It has been a while, but this blog isn't going to be a consistently frequent thing, and things feel right for a quick stock-take.

Since the couple of surprising PB's I achieved in August, my focus has shifted a bit, become a bit broader, but hopefully not to the point of losing focus on my goal. Writing this post up is partly me trying to restate that goal to myself. So that's the goal - 3:10:00 at the Gold Coast 2019. 614 days to go.

I've been doing PT sessions at a local gym for over a year now, and it's been great to have some external support for stating and achieving goals. The gym runs occasional 10 week challenges, with a body composition scan at the start and finish, and ongoing encouragement to use a food diary. The food diary has been my main motivator for joining in, as my past experience tells me that bad habits slip back in very easily, and it's very easy to just not notice.

I did pretty well with the 10 week challenge this run through (I did it at the start of the year as well), losing about 4.5kg, and dropping by body fat from 15.8kg to 12.6kg. My body fat percentage is just over 15%, so that's heading in the right direction.

I have also managed, for the first time in my adult life, to be neither overweight nor obese.

One funny thing I've found is the feeling of being a bit fat, of taking up just a bit too much space, hasn't really gone away yet. I still don't immediately recognise myself in the mirror.

It's nice to have met a goal, but things have gone a bit off track since the challenge finished, with the inevitable "off-the-leash" weekend, some widespread rain keeping me off the bike and a few worrying niggles resurfacing.

Still haven't committed to another interim goal yet, and I need to, or things will start to drift again.

I've found myself heading along to group bike rides more often, as the social aspect of cycling is far more rewarding than running the same old routes by myself. The lack of a social running group in my area has been a bit of a barrier, so I will be trying to seek that out in the future.

So I guess that's the interim goal - find a goal that gets me part of the way there. That's good enough for now.