Marathon Week

Evening all!

After yesterday's quite grumpy post, I actually feel pretty perky today! I think I just needed to vent a little. I felt perfectly justified ignoring my weight-loss during revision, but once the post-exam happiness wore off, all I was left with was a substantial gain in weight, and the realisation that I would have to lose the same pounds ALL OVER AGAIN. They say hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I'm sure I COULD have exercised, had I planned my revision better/done it earlier. But hey, that's enough focussing on past failures, right? Let's look forward to what I've got planned for this week!

And the title rather gives it away. This week, I am running a marathon. Now, before anyone gets too impressed, I'm not REALLY running a marathon. Rather, I'm trying to cover a marathon distance before my Monday weigh-in.

As I usually run 4 miles when I exercise, and a marathon is 26.2 miles, I have decided to just try and run my 4-mile route every day this week. If I manage it that will give me 28 miles, so a marathon and then some, but its nice to have some breathing space, so I can cut one run short if I want to.

I have actually done this before, on my previous weight loss attempt (so some time around 2009-2010). I decided to do it again this week, as a way of kick-starting the weight loss again, now my exams are over. I've got a couple of weeks before Uni starts up again, and I want to use this time, when I'm free of commitments, to really nail down some things. Things like getting into a regular exercise routine. A regular DAILY routine, in fact - I want set sleep hours, set times when I ought to be working, etc etc. I've been coasting for so long, and one of the reasons I had to forgo exercise during revision was because I'd left it so late.

I've written about this before - when I was planning to lose weight in the past, I would always put it off, always say I would start tomorrow. The same thing has been happening in other aspects of my life, for about as long - I put things off, leave them to the last minute, and then just do enough to get by. I'm the king of procrastinators! I know I'm capable of so much more than I let myself achieve, and its especially frustrating as I've actually achieved quite a lot in my time, so I can't help but wonder how much better I'd be if I wasn't winging it all the time!

As such, I'm hoping that some of the lessons I've learned from my weight loss can be used to improve other aspects of my life. Its a lot to ask for, I know, but fingers crossed.

Anyway, a bit of a diversion there! I ran on Monday and again this evening, so I've already bagged 8 miles for this week towards my goal. The weight is already at a decent loss, but I don't want to count my chickens just yet - the last time I did this marathon week, I didn't actually lose very much weight, for whatever reason (retaining water/building muscle/eating more to compensate etc etc). In a way this week isn't so much about losing weight as it is about getting back into my exercise. That is the main goal, and if I can achieve that, the weight loss will follow!