Half-Marathon Training and starting again

So, I've been kinda floating for a while. Trying to maintain, but mainly half-assing a half thought out work-out routine in order to be able to eat what I want and stay relatively in shape. Things got harder and fell off even more when it got cold enough outside that I wasn't comfortable riding my bike to work every day. The past few weeks I've been running maybe 8-10 miles a week and lifting 1-2 days, but that's basically been it.

We all know that exercise and good eating habits are all part of staying in shape and being healthy. I need to better align myself with that again. Like many of you, the holidays could have gone better, and over the past two months my weight has slowly crept up to around 214. That is still not a bad weight for me at 6'3", and right in the range my doctor recommended for me a year ago. However, my lowest average weight was about 204, so as far as I see it, I've gained 10 pounds. Ironically, one year ago today I weighed exactly the same as I do today.

My body can still perform like it did at 204, in fact, just today I ran a 5k on the treadmill without really pushing TOO hard. After checking my numbers it was my 4th or 5th best time ever. That's not too bad really, especially for not really trying to hard. I can also bench the same amount today that I could 6 months ago.

Anyway, since I'm really trying not to ramble, let me just get to my points:

- I feel like I've lost a bit of my drive to stay in shape and eat right. Blame it on the time of year, circumstances with my commute to work, being basically comfortable with my weight, the direction the wind is blowing, whatever. I'm going to change things in order to give myself back that drive.

- I'm running a Half Marathon, the Sun Trust National Marathon in Washington DC on March 21. I'm starting a regimented 10 week training schedule for that event this Monday. I really want to be able to mark down on my list of accomplishments a half marathon, so no time like now to get started on that. Two of my co workers are doing it with me, so that really helps too :

- I'm going to pay better attention to what's going in my body. You see, losing 100 pounds was easy. I cut out almost all saturated fats, kept my calories around 2500 a day, ate breakfast every day, and exercised my ass off any way I could. 6 months later the weight was gone. Building muscle and maintaining weight for the rest of your life, well, that's the hard part.

- I hope to start posting more to hold myself accountable for what's going on. My posts fell off when I didnt have much to say. Normally when you don't hear from me its because things are going well. I'm not breaking any personal records, but I'm not doing bad either. I'm posting now because I don't want to be one of the many who fall off the life long wagon. My blog is how I keep myself in check.


That's all I'm going to say for now. I have more to say, but I'll save it for the next post.