The whole diet and exercise thing continues apace. I've been emphasizing strength workouts lately and doing more sprint work. On a good day I can now do three sets of 10 actual pull-ups and I'm coming closer on the Texas Push-Up Challenge (more on that later).

Also, I've lost close to ten pounds over the last two or three weeks. According to the Men's Health web site, my curent weight puts me at about 16.23% body fat. I know this is a guestimate at best, but let's just use it as a sarting point. Some quick calculator work tells me that means fat accounts for something like 31 pounds of my total body weight.

Although I'd like to be as lean as possible, this really illuminating information, makes me think that getting into the single digits isn't very practical or realistic. If I aimed for 10% bodyfat, however, we're only talking about losing another 10 or 12 pounds. That would put me very close to my original 175-180 pound target range. As a point of reference, the yellow blob pictured at the top of this post represents 5 pounds of fat, so I would need to lose two of those--and no, that's not a three-year-old's hand.

Two Weeks Out

Illness and a rocky start for spring semester leaves me in the awkward position of having a race in two weeks that I haven't really prepared for, much. I feel like there's a good chance I'll beat my time from last year (23:24), but I won't come close to my original goal of a sub-22:00.

In my defense, a lot of my energies have been going toward work stuff, including an amazingly stubborn student who refuses to believe that Muslims worship the same God as Christians and Jews. Worst of all, he continues to refer to the Muslim God as Abba. I'm not a believer, but honestly, if this were the soundtrack of paradise, I might reconsider.

Down with the Sickness

This week brings us not just the first week of spring classes, but also my first illness of the new decade. What I thought was a mild cold has proven instead to be quite the uncomfortable sinus infection. Call me a crybaby, but besides one very mild workout I hoped would jump-start the old immune system I haven't done much besides snuffle, make ugly squinty faces, and produce mucus. Look for further updates once this subsides.

Tryin' to Catch me Eatin' Dirty

I've stopped the food diary because the results are conclusive and unequivocal.

Average calories: 2283
Average Carbs: 227=908 calories
Average Protein: 121 grams=484 calories
Average Fat: 99 grams=891 calories

From where I'm sitting it looks like I need to reduce the amount a fat I'm getting by about 20 grams and replace them with about 50 grams of protein. Shaving another hundred calories off the carbs total for the next couple weeks wouldn't hurt either.

Right now I'm imaging something like this:

Average calories: 2283
Average Carbs: 200=800 calories
Average Protein: 121 grams=484 calories
Average Fat: 79grams=711calories

It's still too cold here so I did a modified long slow day in the gym. The scale said 196 when I checked, which, if my math is correct, is one pound lighter than I was this time last week. Since there are 3500 calories in a pound of fat, I'm going to try to trim another 500 cal/day this coming week to see if that shaves off two pounds. I'm not in a supper big hurry, but it would be nice to be down to 185 or so before my next race.

Benchmarks

Ok, so my main (i.e., not entirely vain) fitness goals have almost always been cardio and endurance related. This hasn't changed, so my three main benchmarks for the year are going to be:

		Current Best	Desired
5k Run		22:13	20:00
10 mile time trial		About 30:00	26:00
30 mile road ride		About 2:45:00	1:30:00

I don't have any current benchmarks for these, but I will endeavor to generate some posthaste. I'll be posting summaries of workouts aimed at meeting the goal times throughout the year

Additional, but secondary benchmarks and goals:

	Current Max	Desired Max
Dead lift	250	325
Back Squat	200	250
Bench press	160	200
Pull up	9 consecutive	20 consecutive

This last set is less objective and more embarrassing. I think these are how the numbers should
work out, but I'm more concerned with the waist size than I am with the weight.

	Current	Desired
waist	36	30
weight	197	175-180

The food diary is still going (although I may get what I need from that in one week) and I'm fully recovered from my holiday binges so short-term goal number one is to post some sort of progress within the next fourteen days.

New Year's Resolution

The word resolution comes from the Latin resolutionem , which means to break something into smaller parts as a means of simplifying it. With that in mind, my new year's resolutions are small and, I think, simple.

1. Eat better

While the quality of my diet is, generally, pretty good, the quantity is an issue. In particular, I need to replace a hefty chunk of my non Omega 3 or 6 fats (read: ice cream and tortilla chips) with good protein and some more complex carbohydrates. I'm going to commit to two weeks of keeping a food diary to see if the outlines of a good diet might be lurking under there.

2. Exercise better

I got more exercise last year than in the previous couple put together. Now I want to start thinking about what I'm doing in terms of performance and health. I need to think more about the relationship between work and recovery, but I'm also going to allow myself some vanity and aim for growing a little bit of a beach body. That said, this year I want to be specifically training for something every time I work out (vanity is something, right?). For the next month or so that will be the 5-K I have coming up--after that I'm not so sure.

3. Sleep Better

Last year I let work really mess up my sleep schedule. No more. I'm aiming for at least seven hours a night--and maybe as many as nine some night--for the next 362 days.

And there they are. I took some baseline measurements thins afternoon and I'll put up a post with current numbers and my end-of-year goals for incentive.