Matt Gets Running

Wel­come to the 100th blog post­ing on Matt Gets Run­ning To mark the occa­sion, here’s a video of my (Good) Fri­day run, along the Avon Gorge towpath, up the hill into Leigh Woods, around a little detour—to reverse out of some of the worst of the mud I ran into!—and then back to the Clifton Sus­pen­sion Bridge.

Today I was plan­ning on blog­ging about weight, and watch­ing this video really under­lines why it’s some­thing I need to talk about. Because, fairly clearly, although I’ve been jog­ging for nine months, I’m still quite lardy.

In fact, I’ve not lost much weight at all. Since I star­ted run­ning, I’ve come from around 17 stone 7 lbs (245lbs, or 111kg) down to 16 stone 12.5 lbs. That’s a drop of 8.5lbs, or a smidge under 4kg.

That’s not to say that run­ning hasn’t had a sig­ni­fic­ant impact on my weight. Because before I took up run­ning, I was slowly but stead­ily put­ting weight on, rather than tak­ing it off. Good­ness knows what weight I’d be by now if I hadn’t effect­ively reversed that trend, and all by get­ting out and running.

But I’ve come to real­ise recently that abso­lutely the best thing I could do to speed myself up, and to avoid injury, and reduce strain on my joints and muscles, espe­cially my occa­sion­ally achey hip, is to lose more weight.

Now, I could run even more, which would cer­tainly burn some more cal­or­ies. But that’s unlikely to be too effect­ive. A pound of weight equates to about 3,500 cal­or­ies (kcal.) The longest run I’ve ever done was the 12K I did a few week­ends ago. And, accord­ing to the Run­Keeper log, that burned 1,437 calories.

Which is the equi­val­ent of less than half a pound of fat. So even if I did two of those every week, on top of my nor­mal runs, and changed noth­ing else at all, I’d lose less than a pound a week.

So, that doesn’t seem like the most effi­cient way of doing things. It may be time to men­tion the dreaded “D word”: diet.

Now, my nor­mal diet is actu­ally not too bad. I don’t eat too much unhealthy crap. I have a tend­ency towards eat­ing cake after lunch at the week­ends, but apart from that, my cal­or­ies are gen­er­ally com­ing from quite healthy food choices. I don’t eat junk, I don’t drink alco­hol, I hardly ever eat chocol­ate bars. I’ve not eaten in a McDonald’s or a KFC since the 1990s. And even then it was prob­ably under protest.

No. My prob­lem is, quite simply, eat­ing too much. My por­tions are too big.

I’ve been gradu­ally chip­ping away at that a bit recently, using some simple meth­ods — buy­ing Kellogg’s Vari­ety Packs for break­fast, for example, so there’s a pre-measured amount that’s easy to stick to. And cut­ting extras out of my lunch­time meal at work.

I’ve not really attacked my even­ing meal yet, or addressed my latte habit. And, most import­antly, I’ve not actu­ally delib­er­ately tried to restrict my cal­orie intake to less than I need. I mean, my cur­rent eat­ing habits appear to be sens­ible and sus­tain­able, in that I’m still, very gradu­ally, los­ing weight. So I’m clearly not eat­ing more than I need to eat.

But if I want to make run­ning a half mara­thon in Septem­ber as easy as pos­sible, the best thing I can do, apart from keep­ing up my train­ing and gradu­ally build­ing up my dis­tance, is to attack my weight through diet as well as through running.

I think a sens­ible goal would be to lose around a pound a week. Given that the half-marathon is on 5th Septem­ber, around five months away, that would mean about 20 pounds. To give myself a nice “round” num­ber — albeit in the anti­quated avoir­dupois scale I still cling to to meas­ure my body weight — I’ll call my tar­get weight 15-and-a-half stone, which is 217 pounds, or about 98 kilos.

So. That’s my tar­get. Fif­teen and a half stone by 5 Septem­ber. And I’ll be blog­ging my pro­gress with my weight along with my pro­gress with the run­ning. Who knows, pos­sibly accom­pan­ied by pic­tures and video, you never know!

Have a happy Easter. Per­son­ally, in the greatest tra­di­tion of diets, I’m going to start mine after the hol­i­day. In the mean­time, where did I put that Cadbury’s Easter egg?