Time to Make A Change

Ok, I decided tonight right after I got in my car that I will not be running five times a week any longer. Instead I will be riding a bike on two or three days and running the other two. I made this decision for a few reasons. Let's examine the big three.

A) My knees are killing me. There are nights when I get off the treadmill and feel like someone has taken a baseball bat to them. It's about one out of every three times. Maybe four. I think it's because I feel like I have to constantly push myself to hit the goals I set for myself.

B) My focus is on calories, not distance. I came to this conclusion about a week ago. If I burn 800 calories in 5.5 miles, it's just as good for me as if I did it in 5.70 miles. Right? I did the same thing to my body in both scenarios.

C) I'd like to work on different muscle groups. It's as simple as that. I want to start to mix it up a little bit more.

I wonder how many calories I would be burn on the bicycle? It'll be fun to find out!

So how did I do today? Well, I set out to hit 840 calories and ended up with 845. Sweet! I also ended up at 5.71 miles. Both are new highs. For dinner, my wife prepared some steamed vegetables, baked beans, and some small chicken tenders. She baked them as opposed to frying them. She marinated the tenders in soy sauce for a while prior to baking them. It's amazing how much flavor is added with just a little bit of sauce. It's been around an hour since dinner and I feel pretty good aside from the knees feeling a little tight. Dinner seems to be sitting very well. I have to applaud my wife for helping me along. She's trying to make some changes inher lifestyle right now and it is comforting to know that she's got my back and ecourages me. She makes smarter decisions for dinner each week. Whether it's portion size or the actual items, I think she's done a lot for both of us lately to make sure we are going to meet our long term goals. It's kind of like having a partner that works out with you at the gym. Things are much easier when you have someone watching your back and pushing you.

I think I had somewhere around 56 ounces of water in the time since I started running tonight. That's a pretty fair amount in 3 hours. I also had around 48 before I left work. Not to shabby. Water always helps curb little appetites. I can't say enough about the benefits of it.

So tomorrow I will be biking. I have ZERO idea as to how well I will be doing. I hope to burn an equal amount of calories if not more. We'll see!

The Beast Will Not Be Tamed!

About three hours after the previous post I hit the gym. I used yesterday's numbers as a gauge for my progress. Short and sweet, I set two new highs. I'm happy to say I hit 5.66 miles and 833 calories! Again, I did not expect to hit it, but I hoped to at least do as well. I think if I keep trying to add a few more calories each day I'll be good. My 30th birthday is coming up in just over a month. I'd really love to be running 6 miles an hour by then. By then, I ought to be able to burn 1,000 calories an hour. I spoke to my mom tonight and she said I can borrow the Gazelle, so I should be able to rip off another 100 calories or so at night when catching up on TV shows. If I can get myself motivated enough, I'll start doing it in the morning. Gotta do everything I can when I can if I want to see results. I do see results now, but I'd like to kick it up a step or two.

As far as eating hard boiled eggs as a snack, I will be cutting out the yolks wherever possible. I read tonight that roughly 55 or 75 calories come from the yolk. I might eat a few egg whites and one or two yolks here and there for the taste. Just another place to cut out unnecessary calories. Now I gotta start cutting out drinking calories. I crushed a 32 oz. Gatorade after my run today. Well, back goes 200 calories right there! Wow, is that aggravating.

Another Victory

Yesterday saw me reach two new highs. In terms of miles, I ran 5.57 this time around. I think that the reason behind that was because I set out to break the calorie barrier of 800. Rather than focus on how far I ran, I wanted to see how much I could burn in the hour. As it turns out, I ended up going from previous high of 798 to new high of 828 calories. That's insane for me to think about. That is almost 500 more calories burned in an hour than when I started running about 7 1/2 weeks ago.

I knew I was in good shape around 15 minutes into the run. Typically, I feel a little heavier on my feet at the beginning. I felt like I was running 10 pounds lighter than normal. For some reason I felt like I was gliding a little more in my run. I set out with a goal of around 67 calories every five minutes. I noticed at around that fifteen minute mark that I was hitting around 70 per five minute increment. Overall I was around 12-20 calories ahead of my goal(s). I think I will use that as my gauge for today's run. I will know exactly where I stand versus my best run. With about two minutes left into yesterday's run, I had already exceeded the 800 calorie goal. That' when I pushed hard to beat the 5.55 miles. I barely beat it.

I had no idea that I would have done that well. For dinner the night before I ate a huge salad at one of my favorite restaurants. I also had a bowl of chili and some bread. Not the best thing to do, I know. For lunch yesterday I had two sandwiches made on Asiago cheese bagels. They were capacole and hot pepper cheese. Delicious! I looked at my Angel (my wife) and said, "I am definitely gonna have to run hard today." For dinner last night, we shared a General Tso's combo and some dumplings. I'm anxious to get back on the treadmill today. My legs feel way better than I expected them to. I'll be back again soon with the update.

More Links

Check out the links on the right. I added three more today. Fitness Wikia, Health Wikia and Food Wikia are all very good sites (in theory) designed on the wiki platform. It's great stuff. Community sites are what web 2.0 is all about, right?

Not Ready for the Rockies

I’ve been hitting the Mountain Climber at the Gym. I go strong for about 15 minutes. But my bpm is like at 170-190. I have to keep to 2 mph just to get anything out of it!

It makes me feel a little stronger though. I added like 30lbs to my weights. Abs added about 10lbs. Next year I’m going to climb the Alps 3 days a week!

More Progress Made

Yesterday saw me blow past my next personal goal. I hit 5.55 miles on the treadmill over my 60:00 run. I came about as close as possible to beating the calorie high too. I hit 797 where the high is 798. Yesterday was different for me. Instead of trying to run further than before, I set out to burn a new high in calories to see what happens. My goal was 800 calories. As it turns out, I was .00375% short. Not bad! My legs felt much better than before. I kept a nice pace of around 7.5 mph for almost half of the time with a walking speed of around 4.0-4.2 for the other half. I think I am going to start to concentrate on burning calories for a bit. The way I look at it is this; it doesn't matter how far I have to go to burn the calories or what I actually do. It's the calories being burned that matter. I'd love to hammer out 1,000 on the treadmill. To me, that is definitely attainable. My mom has a Tony Little Gazelle that I'd like to borrow off of her to burn an extra 100 or so at night before bed. I've used it before and it's great.

How have I been eating since Easter? In a word, better. I've been snacking on hard boiled eggs and popcorn cooked on the stove. For dinner last night I had two burgers with no bun. They were average sized patties. The two of them would probably be slightly larger than a normal cheeseburger, but since I did not have buns on them, I felt justified. For a side, I did have a baked potato though. Other than that, no snacks after dinner over the next 4 hours. Just water and chocolate milk. Could have done better, could have done worse.

I've been on a salad kick lately too. I've tried to add one to all my dinners as a larger portion of my meals. We picked up some pre-cooked buffalo tenders from Tyson. They're great, just pop them in the microwave for 4 minutes, turning them over at 2:00 in. They have a nice flavor that would add a nice kick to your salad. I'm gonna try that this weekend when I pick up some more lettuce. Speaking of, the lettuce and spinach crops are in the ground now. The pre-washed bagged salads will be here before long. After last fall's E. coli outbreak in spinach that sickened 200 people and killed three, the big question is, are those leafy greens safe to eat? Me personally, I love to buy romaine by the stalk or head. It takes seconds to cut up and tastes fresher to me. I bought a lettuce knife last year at Target for 25¢ and it's simple. I'd prefer this over a bag any day. Who knows what marinates in a bag in the middle of a hot summer day?

Links

Gonna add a few links today for you to check out when you have free time. If you're looking for recipes, ideas or help, check out the following sites.

• American Dietetic Association
• FoodFit
• Meals Matter
• Slashfood
• That's Fit

I will park these on the right hand side of the side too for easy access. If you have a personal favorite you'd like us to add, drop a line!

Site Changes

You may or may not notice a few changes to the site today. The most obvious is the color scheme. What you may not pick up on though is the change to the posts. Not only are posts labeled by author now, they also have secondary and tertiary tags to them so you can sort by topic and not only by the people creating the articles. You'll also notice a couple of site feeds to the right side. For now, there are live feeds from Slashfood and That's Fit. I will add more as I find them. If you have a suggestion, please let me know.

As always, if you are interested in helping out on this site, please email me at swebster77@sbcglobal.net and I will be happy to get back.

Update (By the Numbers)

Well Easter weekend has come and passed. How did everyone do? Eat a bunch of stuff on Sunday that you regret still on Wednesday? I know I certainly thought twice about all the food I ate later on Sunday night. I had pancakes for breakfast on Sunday and then a few cookies at my mom's house. Later in the evening around 5:30 we had dinner at my in-law's house. Delicious spread of things like (of course) ham, deviled eggs, steamed vegetables, salad, homemade sausage and capacole. It wasn't exactly a bunch of bad stuff, just a little too much in the belly when all was said and done. In the end, I didn't really regret it, more like I was just trying to get comfortable later on the couch and I just wasn't able to very easily. It's alright though since Easter is once a year and there aren't that many holidays in a year like this. Plus, I feel like I kinda owed it to myself.

For a few reasons that I won't go into here, I was not able to run on Saturday. With Sunday being Easter, obviously I didn't run either. So rather than one day off on Friday, I had three in a row. Wow! I am gonna do all I can to not let that happen again anytime soon. It felt like I was off for two weeks. By the time I was done, my legs were more sore than any other times in recent history. I ended up short of my high of 5.24 when I finished at 5.07 miles. I was a little discouraged. I thought that the extra rest would have helped. Nope. On the calorie side, I did continue to burn more than previously with a high of 757 in the hour.

Last night was a different story altogether. I'm happy to announce that I cruised to a new high of 5.38 miles going well past my third goal of 5.25 miles almost three weeks early! I also burned 798 calories! I was literally seconds away from eclipsing 800. Oh well, that's just another number to beat. I am gonna work on the next goal of 5.50 miles. I hope to hit it by month end. I had to really push myself to get to this new high last night. The thing is, it seemed to come a little easier than the night before when I did over 1/4 mile less. My calves are very tender today. Walking is fine and going up stairs is no problem. Walking down though really takes a little more effort today. I hope to recover okay for tomorrow night. I'd love to beat both numbers but I do not expect to.

This post mentions that it's an update by the numbers so I will get right to them.

• 8 straight days of running 5 or more miles
• 12 straight days of running 4.5 or more miles
• 31 days of running
• High in calories burned - 798
• High in miles run - 5.38
• Average Calorie Burn - 570
• Average Distance Run - 4.27
• 132.06 total miles run
• 17,669 total calories burned

Chart #1 shows miles run with actual versus average
Chart #2 shows calories burned with actual versus average

FUN FACT: Cumulatively, I have run the distance from Cleveland, OH to Pittsburgh, PA so far.

Eckrich Turkey Sausage Smoked

by Jamie Hunter

While I was shopping last week, I found Eckrich Kielbasa on sale for 5 for $10. Anyone that's shopped for sausage knows that Eckrich hardly ever goes on sale, at least not at Giant Eagle, so I jumped all over this deal. Well, today while I was preparing my lunch I happened to take a look at the label and noticed it said Turkey Kielbasa. Now I've never been a fan of turkey based products. Not because I don't like turkey but because it's always seemed weird to see "turkey burger" or turkey whatever.

At any rate I was pleasantly surprised by the taste of these sausages. They are tremendously lower in fat than the original pork sausages, and they don't taste as salty either. I highly recommend them if you are looking for a healthy alternative to regular Kielbasa. Try them and you just might be as surprised as I was at the flavor.