It’s the new year, the holiday period is over and, like many people, my thoughts have turned to getting fit. I’ve put on a fair bit of weight recently and being in my mid forties, it’s probably going to be hard to shift. Middle-age spread has started and it needs to be stopped.
Until about six months ago, I was at the peak of my fitness. I’d been running seriously for ten years and had experienced near continuous improvement. Indeed, I recorded a new 10K PB last June. However, by then I had been running with a dull pain in my pelvis for a few months, so I decided it was time to take a rest and investigate the cause.
During those six months, I’ve piled on about six kilogrammes and I’d like to shed them before I consider starting to train seriously again. Following some recent scans, I’m cautiously optimistic that my injury is healing, so I’m setting myself an ambitious target of losing six kilogrammes in six weeks to get back to my racing weight. I don’t want to put any additional strain on my poor muscles and joints by making them carry even more weight than they used to before I got injured.
The only way I’ll have a chance of actually making that target is to write it down and publish it, so I can’t pretend that it doesn’t exist. So there it is in print, and I’m going to keep a diary tracking my progress to help keep me focused on the goal over the coming weeks.
I’ll attack the challenge on two fronts, by reducing my calorie intake and by gradually increasing my level of physical activity, which has basically been nil over the past month. I’ll try to eat as healthily as possible and start off with some yoga and strength building exercises and easy cycling before moving on to anything more strenuous, assuming I don’t get an adverse reaction from my injury.
It feels as though it’s a long road back to full fitness stretching ahead of me, and to be honest it’s pretty daunting. I don’t know if I have the mental discipline to stick rigidly to my plan, but I’m starting off with the best intentions. Hopefully I can get back into decent shape by the summer.