According to Mike Tyson “everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth”, and while I don’t generally think Mike Tyson has a lot of well thought out things to say, this quote, is a good one. And while I did not literally get punched in the face, life happens, and my best laid plans went to the wayside. It has now been about four weeks since I began my marathon training and diet program and everything is going great, but it is not going according to my original plan.

One of the first things that I changed was my weekend race training. After thinking about it for a little while, I realized that I am not training for a marathon, but training for four races over four consecutive days. So if I were to continue doing standard marathon training protocol I would be ill prepared for such an intense weekend. So now I have made both Saturday and Sunday for long race training. The way that the Dopey Challenge is set up, we do the shortest race on the first day and the longest on the last day, so I am taking that formula and incorporating it to my training. On Saturday morning I am doing a shorter, but faster paced run and on Sunday morning I am doing a longer and slower paced training session. For example, this past weekend on Saturday I jogged/walked five miles with a pace of 10.5 minutes per mile, and on Sunday I jogged/walked ten miles with a 13 minute per mile pace. I feel that training this way is going to give me the best chance of feeling very prepared when race day comes.

I am still doing cardiovascular exercise during the week, but that has changed slightly as well. I am taking Monday off from cardio completely. I need this day off! After two days of hard distance training my legs are sore, and I can tell that my back is a little tired as well. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday I am doing my 45 minutes on the elliptical, and on Wednesday I am doing a 45 minute jog/walk on the beach. Something else that I have added into my repertoire is the stairmill. Now, as difficult as the stairmill is, I absolutely love it. A couple years ago I was doing 200+ stories per day, but now, I have just added 15 minutes of the stairmill most days after I weight train. I have added this in for two reasons, first, it will help with my fat loss, but more importantly it will really help with my cardiovascular strength.

My weight training has changed a little bit as well. Since I choose to do my cardiovascular exercise in the morning, I can always make sure to get that in, as nothing has come up during the day to change my plans. That is, unfortunately, not always the case in the afternoon. Even though I try to get in six weight training days per week, most weeks it ends up being only four or five, as I mentioned earlier, life happens. But the one thing that I have absolutely changed is that I do not weight train on Sunday. After the long training morning, I am way too worn out to get a good workout in. So between Monday and Saturday I fit in my weights as much as I can.

My diet is also going well, and this part of my plan is the least changed out of everything, the one meal that has changed is meal six, the last meal that I eat before bed. I am keeping the carbohydrate intake for meal six very low, but instead of a shake and eggs, I have been eating chicken and Ole Wellness Wraps. I have become addicted to the wraps! They taste great, have very low net carbohydrates and are loaded with fiber. Since they are so high in fiber they are slowing the digestion process thus giving me the steady release of amino acids from the protein that I need. This slow release is the effect that I was looking for from the casein protein, so I am calling it an even trade.

So how is all of this working with my original goals?
I took my weight and body fat readings and found that my progress with body transformation has been fantastic. My weight has dropped from 265 lbs to 253 lbs, and my body fat readings have dropped from 13.78% to 10.30%. These results are amazing and I did not expect to see these kind of results so quickly. The best part about these readings is that I have lost 11 lbs of body fat and no muscle mass. In addition to that, my pace time has decreased an average of one minute per mile.

Clearly my diet, cardio, and weight training is exactly where it should be for my fat loss goals so far, I have also noticed significant increases in my pace time over larger distances.

What now? I am actually going to have to start increasing my food intake slightly. Although I love the fat loss, if I am not careful I will begin burning muscle just as fast as the fat, so my goal for the next month is to slow down the fat loss, by increasing my calories. There are two ways to slow the fat burning, first I could decrease my cardiovascular exercise, which I am not going to do, since training for the Dopey Challenge is my primary goal, the second way to slow the fat loss is by increasing my food intake, and that I can do.