Motivated to Succeed

way to get a few miles in with the hectic schedule...

if weight loss is a big goal, a couple of tips to help give you the edge would be to

1) keep your running aerobic such that you can talk in broken sentences throughout - this is your fat-burning zone, and if you're running much faster, you'll be burning more glycogen for fuel.

2) whenever possible, run in the morning before you eat anything; this also burns more fat as fuel (just read a couple of university studies from US and abroad agreeing with this...)

3) drink lots of water, and not much else; people don't generally realize how many liquid calories they are ingesting, not to mention that if you drink around a gallon a day (wouldn't recommend much more than that...), your stomach isn't as empty, so you'll eat less

4) obviously, the more miles you run, the better off you'll be, but i certainly empathize with time constraints at the moment.

...hope that helps, and happy running...

This helps tremendously, John. I guess it's the perfect time anyways considering that our bodies want to "slow" down during winter months. I will try to keep my miles easy and slow.

I just feel like I will lose fitness! Right now I can manage 4-5 miles on the treadmill at 7mph. Would you consider me bumping it down to 6.5 or 6.6? (about 9 min miles?). I think I have just been trying to run faster to both finish the run faster and because of the stress I feel like I need to run it out of me. I am hoping to get in some decent runs during the week and a half break from school starting tomorrow night.

I will try to cut out most liquids but water and my decaf coffee with a dash of skim milk!

it's certainly a balancing act with the speed. i will say that i've gotten myself to sub-17 5k shape (and sub-20 100 mile shape) with nothing but slow, easy miles, but it was a lot of them. perhaps you could get to where you're hitting your normal mileage (i.e., what you're hitting now) with slow, easy running, and if you wanted to go farther, go as fast as you feel like.

another idea (one i've implemented many many times) is to slowly increase the pace over the course of the run. similar to sasha's "fat miles," you'll slowly build up, get a good run in, work off some stress (i certainly feel your pain there...), burn some fat, and wear yourself out.

getting a few extra miles over the holidays sounds like a good idea, but do as much as you want to, not so much that you make yourself hate it (we've all seen this; similar to the new year's resolution crowd...)

...and i would never deprive a man of his coffee (thinking fondly of my cup this morning...). typically, i'll have orange juice in the morning, a cup of coffee, and a lot of water throughout the day. about 4 or 5 days a week, i'll throw some chocolate milk in there, because it is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy, which could also be applied to a frosty brew, of which i'll partake once or twice a week...

I will try running more controlled miles. "Fat" miles then are miles that burn off fat? I think for me this would be miles in the 9 minute range, where I am not having to work overly hard to maintain pace.

How is work and everything with you? I work tomorrow and then I will be home for a week and a half. I am looking forward to R&R as well as quality time to run and spend with Emma!

Should I take it far enough to start keeping a food journal? I feel like I am just always hungry! I want to lose weight this winter even if it is a lot of work. I just need to be consistent with running and diet! Diet of course is the hardest part!

"fat miles" was a term sasha coined a year or two ago that *i think* was a method of increasing the pace at which you could run and still be primarily burning fat rather than glycogen, which has the added benefit of lasting much much longer. the best fat-burning pace (in my experience) is one at which you can have a conversation with about half of your sentences broken in half for breath (i.e., pretty easy, but not totally effortless), and i suspect that 9's or 8:45's are probably about right for you...

work is alright, slowing down for Christmas, but alright; i'm doing quite a bit of online training at the moment. awesome...

enjoy your extra time with emma; y'all will have a blast (1st Christmas as a married couple -> excellent)

a food journal has never benefitted me much, but if it will be a good way to keep it in your mind go for it. maybe seeing that double-chocolate-coated-deep-fried-twinkie listed will have a similar effect to a 0 in the mileage log...

good luck...

i just successfully made myself hungry...

(wondering where i can get a double-chocolate-coated-deep-fried-twinkie...)

If you are not using lose it (Loseit.com) I suggest you do. I've been using it for a couple months and it's tremendous at preventing me from eating like a fat kid when I'm not running as much. It's like a high tech food journal. If you join you can friend people to mutually guilt each other.

As for the fat-zone exercise thing. It's true that running/moving at a slower pace burns more fat becasue there is available oxygen that is required. If you exercise faster then you use glycogen which is just replenished later from fat. So it doesn't really matter as long as the calories burned are the same, you either burn the fat now or later.

I tried running slower today. I did 5 miles @ 9:03 pace with .5 miles @ 9:40 pace cool down. What do you think?

Looks good to me; the question is how it felt. Could you have spoken in half a sentence per breath? That's about where a decent chunk of my mileage typically is, and it's smack in the middle of the fat burning zone.

As far as Nate's point about burning fat now or later, to some degree it's true, however, the benefits are starkly different. Running at a slower "more enjoyable" pace will allow you to run farther, thereby burning more calories; it will also allow you to play with your pace at will, which will have the added benefit of you looking forward to your daily run rather than dreading it. When it comes to replenishing glycogen stores, some of the replacement comes from fat, but a decent fraction comes from sugars/carbs still being processed in your body, as well as a couple other energy sources upon which your body draws, so you're not quite getting the same fat burn.

Running benefit-wise, running a little slower will increase your aerobic capacity and get your body more accustomed to the "running activity" which will allow you to perform future speedworkouts much better. Easy running causes the body to create more capillaries to the muscles, strengthens the heart and diaphragm, and generally (for lack of a better way to put it) creates new avenues of fuel delivery. It also, by virtue of utilizing the fat-burning mechanism, accustoms your body to burning fat, which will slowly allow you to run faster and faster with fat as the fuel. Since you have much much more energy in the form of fat than of glycogen, this has great implications for future marathoning performance (again, Sasha has a good explanation of this aspect in his discussion thread of "fat miles" on the discussion forum...) Fast running, whereas it is necessary for optimum race performance, is all about getting the energy there NOW, optimizing the "avenues" you already have.

I really think too many people jump into too much speedwork too quickly and would generally be better served with more easy mileage to create the oft-cited aerobic base. Create the energy delivery pathways over the course of many miles of easy runs, then optimize them with some speed.

Just my $0.02...

I concur Nevels!! You are one smart dude.

With respect to losing weight -- we eat regular meals and even plan our snacks (healthy snacks: almonds/walnuts, fruit -- they are filling, sometimes sweet, and healthy). We never eat to "fullness". Lots of water. I swear just these simple rules have allowed us to keep the middle-age weight off (which is a serious problem no matter how much you run - mid-40's to early 50's you have some serious slowing metabolisms). Don't totally give up things you enjoy, just think about them and make sure you *really* want them -- sometimes you really do, and sometimes you will actually realize you don't need them at all ;-).