I want to be noticed!

Yes, I am the proverbial attention whore (gigalo?)! Damn it, I've lost nearly 50 pounds and I want someone to just come up to me and say: "Hey John, have you been losing weight? You look really good!" But alas . . . I have to point it out to everyone. Wednesday I had lunch with my favorite lender, Gina Miller at Venture Mortgage (call me if you want her number, she's fantastic), and I had to say "Do I look smaller to you?" It had been about 2 months since we'd gotten together and I've lost about 25 pounds in that time. She said "I thought you did! But I didn't want to say anything in case you hadn't." AUUUUGHHHH! People, SEE ME! Ahhh well when Dave Scott hands me the gold medal for the Ironman championships in Kona . . . maybe then someone will know who I am! :-)

My 5K and Self Sabotage

I'll start with the good news, the light stuff first. So this morning, I had it in my head that I wanted to do a 5K . . . or 3.1 miles . . . on the treadmill. I don't know why such things pop into my brain, but they do. I've been meaning to bring my heart rate monitor chest strap to the Y to see if it works on the machines. Rather than grabbing the handles, it would be handy if I could just monitor my heart rate while I went along. So this morning I dug through my desk and found it. I went to put it on and it slid off. WTF? I pulled it back up and it slid off again. AH HA! I weigh about 30 pounds less than the last time I wore this! SWEET! So I had to show Teri. Off to the Y I went.

After stretching a bit, I started out walking at 3.5 MPH. I did this for 0.25 (or about a quarter) miles, then kicked it up to 5.2 MPH which felt fairly comfortable. I wanted to see how long I could actually run (jog, whatever!) before having/wanting/needing to walk again. Well I passed our Triathlon distance of 1.9 miles at 23:53 and kept on going. Finally at 2.25 miles, I slowed it back down to 3.5 MPH. I ran 2 miles non-stop. (OK, I paused a couple seconds to re-tie my headphone cord around my iPod lanyard) I felt REALLY good about that. When I'm in shape, I actually LOVE to run. It's an illness, I know. But I really do enjoy it. Mainly I enjoy the looks from people that seem to say "There is no way somone that big should be that fast" I doubt I'll get the "that fast" feeling ever again, but still. I digress . . . so I walked for another .25 miles then kicked it up to 6.0 MPH for another .25 miles and finally walked the last .35 miles for a total of 3.1 Miles or 5K. Total time was just over 40 minutes. I was stoked to do the 3K (1.9 Miles) in under 24:00 though. With .25 of that walking.

I have mostly eliminated my transgressions of the previous weekend. I'm embarassed to say that I gained 6.0 pounds last weekend. I've lost 5 or so of those this week. If I can get into the gym tomorrow morning as planned, and keep faithful to eating right, I should be OK for Monday's weigh-in. Which brings me to my next point and is not nearly as light as "Hey everyone, I ran this morning!"

So I had my coaching call yesterday. Really the first call with my new coach, Grace. We chit chatted a bit about my workouts, some of my personal goals, etc. She mentioned my heritage profile and how my domineering trait is "Olympian" click the link to read the rest of this post. (more)