Client Profile: Jason, Week of 10/23 – 10/29

I had an amazing week. The main change I made this week nutritionally was to swap out the rice in my “beans & rice” dish I eat for lunch for buckwheat. Buckwheat has a slightly better nutritional profile for my goals and it cooks faster than rice too.

This week I struggled a little with calories in vs. calories burned.  I’ve started my formal training plan for the half-marathon and I’m upping both the frequency and intensity of my runs and I’ve started doing speedwork. Tuesday was a fartlek workout which was a blast and then I put in another fairly fast/intense workout on Wednesday at a sustained pace (basically a tempo run I guess).

By the time I did a slower recovery run on Thursday I was starting to feel the wear and tear. I was never sore, just tired and worn down. I was surprised to see that I’d lost six pounds (from 209 down to 203) from the start of the week until Thursday. While I’m all about losing the weight that seems a bit too fast for me and was probably a factor in why I was starting to feel bad. I purposely ate a little heavier on Thursday night and Friday (rest day) to try and get some calories back into my body and allow it to recover. I gained a few pounds back but I wasn’t upset about it.

Saturday was my 10k race. While I’m fairly comfortable doing the distance, I’ve never completed a 10k race so I wasn’t sure what to expect. To make things even more interesting we had our first snow storm of the season on Saturday morning. It wasn’t too bad as we were just on the edge of the storm that went up the coast. By the start of the race things had warmed up to the mid to upper-30s and there was only an occasional light rain and no snow on the roads/path.

The 10k was a double of the 5k out and back course. The course was mostly flat with some strange parts where it felt like you were going uphill when you were actually going downhill and vice-versa. The event was related to the work I do so I got to see several colleagues and former co-workers. The double out and back was a cool format because all of my friends are also faster than me so I got to see them multiple times on the path as we passed.  On a loop course I would have seen them at the start and never again.

I’m not sure how the planets aligned to make it happen, but I finished in 65:33 (10:22 pace) according to my Garmin. This was about 10 minutes faster than what I was estimating would be a “solid” time for me so I was shocked at my performance. I’m still waiting for them to post the official results online but I don’t think I’ll be more than a few seconds off. Apparently the timer’s software crashed during the race and they had to redo everything at the end. Several of my friends placed (my buddy’s wife won the women’s 5k) and so we waited around for about an hour in the cold before they gave out the medals.

I’m thrilled to have this performance this early in my training. It leaves me wondering if I should alter my half-marathon goal time. I was planning to shoot for a 2:30 half and now I think I can do better than that…possibly much better, as I still have 11 weeks of training to go. I don’t want to go overboard or anything (to be clear, I’m thinking more like 2:20 not 2:00), but it’s definitely going to be in the back of my mind moving forward. If I can drop another 20-30 pounds by the race things could get really interesting…

For next week my main goal is to try to eat a few more calories during the week to have enough energy to get through my heavy running days and not have the (minor) crash that I did this week. Jake wants me to try going gluten-free (or at least cutting back on the gluten as much as possible) and I’m willing to try doing that, but before we go there I’m going to eat up the last of my whole wheat pasta and some other food I have in my cupboards. So this week will be somewhat of a clean-up week to get rid of some of the food that (while still healthy)  isn’t quite where I want to be nutritionally anymore.

Weight Update:
Original weigh-in (9/19/11): 216.2
Week 5 weigh-in (10/29/11): 206.2 (-10 pounds total, down 3.4 from last week)

As always, thanks for reading. You can follow my progress on dailymile or @jwmfitness on twitter.