Week 35, Day 1

Today's weight: 195.6

Today's blood pressure: 132/90

Today's food: yogurt, banana, honey garlic chicken and rice, pot roast with noodles, half a hot dog, doritos, 2 cookies, chocolate milk

Today's exercise: run 2 miles; 60 pushups

Week 34 Wrapup

Fairly uneventful this week. I had the easy runs this week, and they went fine, except for it being really hot, of course. The moving average of my weight is still right at around 195.

Week 34, Day 7

Today's weight: 195

Today's blood pressure: 131/84

Today's food: yogurt, chicken sandwich, fruit salad, doritos, 5 cupcakes, honey garlic chicken with rice, 1/2 bag popcorn, cup of pudding, mike and ikes

Today's exercise: day of rest

Week 34, Day 6

Today's weight: 197.6

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: 2 cupcakes, banana, yogurt, tuna sandwich, fritos, large movie popcorn, 2 cupcakes

Today's exercise: run 5 miles; 60 pushups

Week 34, Day 5

Today's weight: 195

Today's blood pressure: 140/89

Today's food: yogurt, banana, chicken sandwich, pot roast with buttered noodles (2 helpings), 3 cupcakes

Today's exercise: none

Week 34, Day 4

Today's weight: 193.6

Today's blood pressure: 126/83

Today's food: yogurt, banana, cookie, chicken sandwich, panda house (seafood delight), 1 strip bacon, cookie, much grapefruit juice cocktail, egg roll, cookie

Today's exercise: none

Week 34, Day 3

Today's weight: 196.4

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: donut, yogurt, banana, honey garlic chicken and rice, 6 cookies, grapefruit juice cocktail

Today's exercise: 1.5 mile warmup, (run 1 mile @ 8:37, jog .5 miles) X3, 1 mile cooldown (total of 7 miles); 60 pushups

Week 34, Day 2

Today's weight: 193.6

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: donut, yogurt, grapes, chips and salsa, ribeye steak, baked potato, 2 pork chops with peach onion marmalade, 7 cookies

Today's exercise: none

Week 34, Day 1

Today's weight: 196

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: cookie, yogurt, grapes, western bacon cheeseburger combo, 4 donuts

Today's exercise: run 6 miles; 60 pushups

Week 33 Wrapup

Another week of just barely avoiding killing myself. It's still very hot at night when I run (an average of 95 degrees at 10:30 PM).

For the long run this week, I woke up at 4 AM, then left the house at 4:20. I got to the snake bridge and started running at just after 4:30, at which point the sky was already mostly lit up. The sun itself appeared over the horizon just a few minutes later. This was really frustrating to me, as I thought I would be avoiding that for at least a little bit of the run. That's why I got up so early. Sheesh. It was about 79 degrees when I started, and only got up to about 82 by the time I finished at 7:30, but with the sun shining on me the whole time it felt a lot hotter.

My knees really started hurting about six miles in, which was worrying, because I've never had knee trouble before. An occasional knee pain here or there, but not a lot while I'm running. Then, at about the eight mile mark, I landed one stride and had my leg muscles just completely fail to contract in time. So, my leg went limp, and I fell down almost to my knee before bouncing back up again. It was really weird and scary, and I told myself that if it happened again I'd quit the run. It didn't, I pressed on, and all was okay after that.

I drank about 2 1/3 liters total, so I only lost a net 4.8 pounds on that run.

Next week is the off week, which is supposed to just be three easy runs. However, I'm going to throw in speedwork in the middle of the week to make up for the speedwork I wasn't doing when I was on vacation.

Week 33, Day 7

Today's weight: 193.6

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: 2 pop tarts, huge nacho plate, plum, lots of cookies, grapes, spaghetti with meatball

Today's exercise: day of rest

Week 33, Day 6

Today's weight: 196.4*

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: 2 clif bars, slice of pizza, coke, costco samples, honey garlic chicken and rice, popcorn

Today's exercise: run 16 miles; 60 pushups

* before running. 191.6 after running

Week 33, Day 5

Today's weight: 194.2

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: grapes, yogurt, plum, taco bell (grilled stufft burrito, nachos, mountain dew baja blast), fridays (mozzarella sticks, chicken sausage penne)

Today's exercise: none

Week 33, Day 4

Today's weight: 194.8

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: yogurt, plum, 2 pop tarts, 1/2 steak and a little mashed potatoes, hot dog, plum, grapes, spaghetti and meatballs

Today's exercise: none

Week 33, Day 3

Today's weight: 195.2

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: yogurt, plum, chips and salsa, shrimp topopo salad, sesame jack strips, jack daniels strip steak and shrimp

Today's exercise: 1 mile warmup, 4 miles @ 9:13, 1 mile cooldown; 60 pushups

Week 33, Day 2

Today's weight: 195

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: yogurt, plum, garlic squid, doritos, 2 polish dogs, watermelon

Today's exercise: none

Week 33, Day 1

Today's weight: 194.8

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: watermelon, yogurt, banana, 2 donuts, spaghetti and meatballs, watermelon, cookie, popcorn, cookie, watermelon

Today's exercise: run 2 miles; 60 pushups

Week 32 Wrapup

Aside from the running I did on Sunday at the hotel, I didn't run at all this week. I had a number of excuses. First of all, I was just plain too tired. Every day since I got back I've just felt completely exhausted. Secondly, I felt kind of sick. Both of my kids had a stomach flu type thing at different times while we were on vacation, and I think I picked up the tail end of it. I was never puking like they were, but I did feel unpleasant at times. Thirdly, even though I didn't run a lot while I was gone, I did walk a lot, and it was in shoes that were possibly not that well suited for all that walking. My legs just kind of hurt a lot when I got back, and I thought they could use the rest. And fourthly, the 14 mile run before I left did something funky to my leftmost three toes on my left foot. Since that run, they just feel weird, like when you jam your toe. When I wake up, it kind of hurts to walk on that foot for a minute or two but then goes away. It's like the toes are stiff and then warm up. It's a weird injury, but not significant yet.

I'll start up again next week, but it leaves me with a total of only 10 miles for the 2 weeks of vacation. I hope it's not too difficult to get back into the routine again.

Whether or not I gained a lot of weight on the trip depends on your analysis of the numbers. Yes, there's an 8 pound jump between my last weigh-in before the trip and my first weigh-in after. However, I've been arguing for a while that the only meaningful number when you're talking about weight loss is a moving average.

Because of the vagaries of a person's water content, the contents of one's bowels, inconsistent scales, and other inabilities to measure weight precisely, the only true measure of weight loss or weight gain is analyzing a trend over time. Way too many people get hung up on the loss of a pound one day or the gain of a pound the next when small swings like that are virtually out of our control anyway. This is one of the central tenets of the book The Hacker's Diet, which I recommend as a highly interesting engineering approach to the problem of weight control. This concept is by no means exclusive to that book, however.

I know that my own body weight fluctuates wildly based on fluid intake (witness the 7 pound loss in 3 hours a couple of weeks ago.) With the right preparation, I can pee a pound easily. I've had >2 pound bowel movements. A day to day analysis for me is just rather silly. So, in my spreadsheet where I keep track of all this stuff, I have a graph of all the daily readings, and on that graph I superimpose a trend line and a graph of a weighted moving average. The spiky zig zag daily graph is fun to look at, but the other ones are what I'd look at to draw any real conclusions.

If I look at the moving average, that ended up at 194.8 before I left, and is hovering around 195.2 this week now that I'm back. By that view, I haven't even gained half a pound. However, that kind of ignores the fact that I was weighing in the very low 190s before I left, and that if I had stayed home and just eaten normally, the moving average would have quickly fallen to match the low readings I was getting.

To illustrate, here's a chart showing the daily readings (the dots) and the moving average (the red line) (for the dates 5/15-6/15, as rendered by the online companion to The Hacker's Diet):


So, the way I interpret the data is that I really didn't gain a whole lot of weight, but I was on a definite roll weight loss wise, and I surely killed any momentum I had going.

Week 32, Day 7

Today's weight: 196.6

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: donut, several cookies, flat iron steak, roast, mashed potatoes, angel food cake, cookies

Today's exercise: day of rest

Week 32, Day 6

Today's weight: 195.2

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: chicken pizza, 4 donuts, grapes, donut, spaghetti and meatballs

Today's exercise: none

Week 32, Day 5

Today's weight: 194.8

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: 2 1/2 tritip and cheese snaks, yogurt, banana, leftover panda express, hamburger helper taco surprise, popcorn

Today's exercise: none

Week 32, Day 4

Today's weight: 198.4

Today's blood pressure: forgot

Today's food: can of pepsi, yogurt, banana, cracker jack, 2 pieces french toast

Today's exercise: none

Week 32, Day 3

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: hotel breakfast, nasty airport tacos, equally nasty safeway orange chicken

Today's exercise: none - fly home

Week 32, Day 2

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: More Disney World

Today's exercise: Only slightly less walking than yesterday (due to rain, lightning, etc)

Week 32, Day 1

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: Overpriced (yet slightly more reasonable than expected) Disney World food

Today's exercise: walk about 47 miles combined in the three Disney parks we were at today.

Week 31 Wrapup

The cruise was everything I hoped it would be, and I ate just as much as I feared. I think months of eating slightly less has conditioned my body to accept less food being shoved in before getting sick. There were a couple of times on the cruise that I thought that I would either puke or explode, and I know if it had been a couple of years prior I would have had a lot more to go before reaching that point. So, either my body's less tolerant because I'm more healthy, or I'm just getting old or something.

I didn't get to exercise on the ship as much as I would have liked due to a variety of factors: Sick baby, bad weather occasionally limiting the ability to go outside, way too much food, etc.. I ran 5 miles on the ship's jogging track on the first sea day, and I ran 5k on the treadmill a few days later. Other than that, I did a ton of walking, and the ice skating and snorkeling were both pretty good workouts, just in different ways.

The treadmill on the ship was in metric, which confused me for a while because I thought the belt was just spinning way too slow for the speed displayed on the screen. There may have been some secret key command to switch it to American, but I never found it. I did some quick math in my head to figure out the metric equivalent of my training pace, and a calculator later confirmed that I had nailed it, which means I still get to count myself among the people who can do math in their head. I only ran 5k on the treadmill, because although the ship was still in port when I started, it had started moving at a pretty good clip soon after, and was rocking pretty good. Running on a treadmill is hard enough without the treadmill moving sideways under you. I had never run that long on the treadmill before anyway, and when I got off I had the distinct feeling that the ground was still "milling" under me. Couple that with the fact that the ground actually was moving because of the ship's movement, and you get a clear picture of what I would surely look like if I tried walking through a ship whilst heavily intoxicated.

Sunday ended the cruise. Since I won't get to run while at Disney World, I did my two mile easy run this week tonight on the treadmill at the hotel. It was thankfully more stable than the ship.

Week 31, Day 7

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: a tad less

Today's exercise: run 2 miles on treadmill; 60 pushups

last day of cruise, first day of Disney World leg of trip.

Week 31, Day 6

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: A shake for breakfast, a shake for lunch, followed by a sensible dinner. And then several more increasingly less sensible dinners.

Today's exercise: Someone hung a pastry in front of the treadmill, and I ran three miles before I realized I wasn't getting any closer.

seventh day of cruise

Week 31, Day 5

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: So you've seen that scene in Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, right?

Today's exercise: Run several laps around the ship in frantic pursuit of the source of the rumor that they were running out of french fries.

sixth day of cruise

Week 31, Day 4

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: 7,000 heads of fresh lettuce, 36,000 oranges, 42,000 fresh eggs, 122,000 pounds of meat, poultry and fish, 40 tons of potatoes, 1,100 pounds of marmalade.

Today's exercise: repeated vomiting to clear stomach for more food

fifth day of cruise

Week 31, Day 3

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: gorging

Today's exercise: run 5k on treadmill; 14 trips through buffet line

fourth day of cruise

Week 31, Day 2

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: gargantuan helpings of many varied dishes

Today's exercise: move fork to mouth - 10 sets of 100 reps

third day of cruise

Week 31, Day 1

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: copious

Today's exercise: run 5 miles

second day of cruise

Week 30 Wrapup

Because of the cruise this next week, I ran the long run on Friday evening instead of Saturday morning. It was 14 miles, and it was as hard as the last week's 12 mile was easy. I don't know if it was because I had one less night to rest than I normally have, or if it was because I was just not as fresh energy wise at the end of the day, or if it was because of the oppressive heat (To keep from running too much in the dark, I started at 6 PM when it was still 93º out). Either way, I was struggling before I had even gone ten miles. I still ran the whole way, and finished at the target pace, but my legs were really hurting and I felt like throwing up for the last couple of miles. Now, the muscles around my left knee still really hurt, and it's difficult to bend my knee, because the muscles protest.

I drank a liter and a half of gatorade on the way and still came back 7 pounds lighter. That's a net loss of almost a gallon of fluid. If I hadn't had the gatorade with me, I would have lost 5 liters by the time I got back (if I got back at all). Scary stuff.

One interesting phenomenon I've noticed is this: When I do the Wednesday speedwork I've got a warmup and a cooldown. I try to run both slowly, like as slow as I can without feeling like I'm just doing a bouncy walk. On the warmup, that usually works out to about a 12 minute pace. On the cooldown, it ends up being more like 11. It's interesting to me that my perception of speed and effort and such is changed so much by the speedwork, and that I feel like running faster afterwards, even though I'm more exhausted from the effort.

This next week is all cruise, then after that is Disney World. I fully expect to come back from the trip over 200 again.

Week 30, Day 7

Today's weight: don't know

Today's blood pressure: don't know

Today's food: ridiculously too much

Today's exercise: walking from one meal to another

first day of cruise