Setting Goals

Morning Weight: 187.0 lbs

Its been quite some time since I've been blogging regularly, and in the interim I have been travelling a ton. The problem with travelling is that I get out of my routine. When I'm on a routine I do really well about making smart food choices and keeping my consumption under control. But when I travel, that all seems to go out the window. I'm not sure what I'm going to do to keep myself honest during travel periods, but I do know that for the next three weeks I don't really have any travel scheduled. True I will be in Portland for three days, but the nature of that trip is different than most work trips and so I think I can do well while there. My travel over the past weeks was too meeting intense to really include much exercise, and add in the fact that I had a pulled hamstring from chasing Lucy when she escaped, and I didn't reduce my intake accordingly. In fact, with my travel, I have gotten out of the habit of counting calories.

Excuse excuse excuse. Well, At least I know exactly the reasons of my lack of loss, and so now I just need to address them. So I've thought of a new way to look at goals. Previously I've been looking at long term goals such as being under 180lbs by the end of the month, being 170 lbs in another 6 weeks… I'm going to change that and start tracking my goals on a weekly basis. It's too easy for me to rationalize bad behavior by thinking that I'll make it up before the end of the month. If I am true to myself about weekly goals, then I will be more strict about my intake so as not to mess up the weekly goal. So on Wednesday this week I will set my weekly goal for the coming week. Why Wednesday? I don't think my weight today is a true starting point…I'm sure that with two days of being good I will flush some water weight out, and so I want to set a goal based on a true weight, not an inflated weight.

The Victoria half marathon was yesterday and I did ok. I cut three minutes off my Vancouver time from May, so that's progress. In fact I was on track to run a good sub 2hour half but by 9.5 miles I had to slow down significantly. I think the hamstring pull I suffered a few weeks ago really kept me from being in the best shape for this race, though I was definitely in better shape than Vancouver. I'm super sore today, but that's likely to reduce over the coming days. So on to the next race… Lane and I will be looking into a race in the coming months….perhaps the Rock n Roll ½ marathon in Arizona on January 13. I ran a 1:57 there in 2006 without much training so it would be cool to see what I can do this time…