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Hit the scale at 229 this morning, which is a total of 143 pounds of loss.  I haven’t lost a lot of weight the past 8 weeks or so, but my waist has been shrinking!  I bought my first size 38 waist jeans – ever, then bought another pair later that week.

New Years – with the new year, you have millions of people saying, “this year, I’m going to do X”.  Often times, the resolution fades by the time real temptation hits them.  It’s unfortunate, but the way it works and this is pretty much how gyms stay in business.

So get this – over the holidays, I stayed 100% keto.  It wasn’t too difficult.  One that was a little tricky was that at a Christmas dinner, I BROUGHT my own food – which was chicken thighs and cabbage.  I was able to taste “regular” food, but I had ONE BITE, not a slice of anything.  For me, it helped scratch an itch and I didn’t have to put on 10 pounds of holiday weight.  In fact, from Thanksgiving until this moment, I’m actually down 5 pounds.

While I have been on a path the last 27 months, I find myself having goals for 2019 that I set for myself.  So I figured I’d share a few…

1. Work further towards getting into the navy as an IP reserve officer.  I have a few pounds I have to lose yet to make the body fat standards – not that far off at the moment, if you can tell by the pics.
2. Compete in my first sprint triathlon.  It might be York in May or it might be Lancaster in August.  I need to address my bike wheels, aero bars, and open water swimming.  The distances I can do no problem whatsoever, it’s now conditioning myself in zone 2 with some zone 4/5 to get faster and continue to shed weight
3. Hit 15% bodyfat.  I should be hitting this by late summer.  This would be the end of my 3 year journey and will have taken off about 180 pounds by then.
4. Begin writing my book.  I don’t care if it’s just for me.  I like writing, and I have a story to tell.  What process I did to be successful this time around where I failed 800 other times, I feel some people could get value out of what I did.  Many people who have never been overweight don’t really know or comprehend how people get fat to begin with.  There’s a lot of emotion that goes into it.
5. Run my first 10k, probably later in the year.  With my weight much lower, and my miles all year adding up, I’d like to see if I can run a sub 60 minutes in a 10k.  I feel by then I might be around 50-55 minutes, but we shall see!

Over new years, I did a lot of zone 2 work over the holidays.  For those of you late to this party, I’ve jumped into this training head first.  I am now up to about 15 miles per week of running with volume, whereas I used to top out around 6-7 miles.  The problem is, I used to do maybe 70-75% of my running at max effort.  This not only kills your body, but takes a while to recover from – and it doesn’t really make you faster.  By slowing down and exercising 80% in zone 2, you are able to put in the miles, not get sore, and slowly get faster within zone 2.  Goggins also discussed that in his book.  I feel like I unlocked a vault with a secret key, and I feel amazing doing it.  The times appear to be really slow, but I can put up double the volume I used to with 1/3 of the pain/soreness.  This is supposed to help your conditioning and improve the mitochondria numbers – so when you want to access the full tank, you are a Porsche out of the gate.

Tri training

So I swam a mile last week and it was rather easy.  My problems usually are dealing with a crowded pool with a 30 minute time limit.  This time, I was able to let it go a little and get in my mile.  I’ve improved my form a lot!  I also watch a ton of Triathlon Taren on YouTube, he’s helped with me learning this sport from the ground up.  I’m pretty excited to see his new website and training platform soon!!

My 2:41/100 yards was at a pretty relaxing pace with some small breaks here and there.  A sprint tri is 800 yards in open water, but the one I’m looking to do in Lancaster is 300m in a pool to start, so I might be able to come in around a 1:50-1:55/100yd swim in a short distance at zone 3/4 with no breaks.

With biking, I took my old bike and bought a cheap indoor trainer for it.  I am trying to get the cheapest possible setup for Zwift.  That’s the app that allows you to virtually race against other people using your bike, while never leaving your house.  Some of these setups can be $3,000+ dollars.  If you consider a Peloton is $2600 plus a $100 per month subscription, it’s not too terrible.  My setup was to get my old bike out of the shed, spray it down, mount it on a trainer, and get an ANT+ sensor to mount on my bike so it can estimate power and RPMs.  Apparently, your RPMs in biking is a big deal – and possibly one reason I didn’t get noticeably faster.  They contend you should have a cadence (RPMs) at 90.  Those of us at the 50/60 are called something like “grinders” who pedal too slowly at a lower gear.  Apparently, you want to train and bike at 90RPMs to get faster and work with the zone 2, etc.

During the winter months, you can’t bike outside in Pennsylvania, in the United States.  It’s roughly 4-5 months a year it’s too cold, too dark, or too icy outside.  Therefore, you setup an indoor bike situation.  This allows you to continue your tri training while not having access to the roads.  I also found a local tri club on Facebook, so I’m looking forward to meeting a lot of them this year and learning a ton!!!

So – my setup is trying to determine if this is something I have some interest in, and if so, I may upgrade a bit for next fall/winter.  With only about 2-3 months left before I can ride, and not knowing if this is something I’ll dig, I wanted to start at the ground level and try it.  This is what a more serious setup looks like!

The total setup for me to get started was only about $200 – that was a cheap $150 trainer (not a smart trainer, which I goofed with because I thought the cheapest ones were $600) and a sensor.  I used my old bike that was in the shed.  I loved the bike, but it was HEAVY –  it was sturdy because I was nearly 400 pounds when I began riding it, but it also carried with it great weight, which essentially prevented me from doing much hill riding.

I think my next writing in a few weeks will discuss more of my zone 2 and how I’m constructing a training plan.  I read a few books over the holidays on how to actually do this, and I’m excited for it!!