The Week That Was: Weight Management & Running

The first week of 2013 is in the books. In order to keep myself focused on hitting my goals regarding weight management and running, I've decided to post a weekly review on Mondays with how the previous week went.

Starting off with Weight Management, I did a good job of sticking to my calorie target. This year I'm targeting a loss of a ½ pound a week (which equates to a target of 250 calories below maintenance calories). I do get credit for exercise calories burned, and last week was a whopper as I burned off 3,723 calories. I ended the week 1,290 calories below target (meaning I ate back 2,433 of the calories I burned). Add that the my expected ½ pound loss, and mathematically I should have lost 0.9 pounds.

Sadly, actual weight loss doesn't follow mathematics, and I ended up averaging a higher weight over this past week than the previous. Looking at the tabular results:

	Avg	Min	Max	Last	H20	Fat
12/24-12/31	179.9	178.8	181.0	180.0	98.0	45.4
12/31-01/07	180.5	179.6	181.6	180.6	99.0	44.8
	+0.6	+0.8	+0.6	+0.6	+1.0	-0.6

It's hard to argue against saying that I'm 0.6 pounds heavier. However, if I look at my average water and fat weights, the numbers says that I've been carrying an extra pound of water over this past week while averaging 0.6 pounds less of fat. Although I don't completely trust the water and fat percentage numbers from my scale, I wouldn't argue with the thought that I've been carrying extra water as I returned to running this past week after resting my Achilles injury.

Speaking of running, I had a much better week in that regard. I ran four times in the past week adding mileage to each run to build back up to my target of 8 miles minimum for my long run. Here's a look at my mileage for the week:

M	T	W	R	F	S	S
3.60	4.85		6.50		8.30
Total Mileage: 23.25

I set a goal of running 800 miles which would require about 16 miles a week. I eclipsed that number this week and ran just 1.8 miles less than my all-time week most. Here's a graphical look at the miles for the week:

Miles Ran 16 Mile Goal Miles to Max

As for my progress towards my 800 mile goal, here's a chart showing that (keep in mind that the 3.60 miles I ran on Monday were in 2012):

This Week 800 Miles 1000 Miles

I've completed 19.65 miles in 2013, and if I keep up that pace (I won't), I'll end the year with 1195 miles ran well surpassing my goal. I expect that number will slowly shrink over the next few weeks, but it's nice to be nicely ahead of pace for this goal for now.