dbigham

I wrote a long, 11 page journal of the Ottawa Race Weekend. It was amazing!

http://www.danielbigham.ca/cgi-bin/doc.pl?doc=marathon.htm

Well, I’ve lost the 15 pounds I wanted to for my marathon this weekend. Woo hoo! It took about a month and a half I think, so that’s a little over two pounds per week. Something I noticed is that once you stop letting yourself pig out, your stomach does shrink, and then even if you WANT to eat more than you should, your stomach fills up pretty quick. Here are the things that I think helped a lot:

1. Getting up an hour before breakfast (ie. Not eating breakfast for an hour). The theory is that your body will burn some fat since it doesn’t have your breakfast to digest yet.

2. Eating a mid-morning and mid-afternoon “snack”—somewhere around half of a normal meal… and make your other three meals smaller than they would have otherwise been. Eating more often supposedly raises your metabolism and helps shrink your stomach.

3. As just mentioned, reduce the size of your breakfast, lunch, and supper. Especially your supper. Also, be very “objective” about dishing your supper out or making your lunch. Don’t be lazy and give yourself more than you want to eat.

4. Not eating anything after supper, and eating supper before 7:00 PM.

5. Eating a significant serving of vegetables both at lunch and at supper. Everyday. The fiber fills you up, and it’s good for you!

6. Cutting out all bad-for-you foods: Anything high in saturated fat or anything that is mostly refined sugar. No pizza, no hamburgers, no pop, no candy, etc.

I think if someone can do these things, they’ll definitely lose weight. Obviously exercise is the other half of this equation… I recommend running! It’s about the most efficient exercise in terms of time and cost, but ease into it slowly so that you don’t make your legs or feet sore.

Good luck!

Every couple of months we get a magazine named GRAND: Living Well in Waterloo Region delivered to our doorstep. It’s a free magazine that contains interesting, well photographed articles about people, businesses, and places in the region.

An article that I enjoyed reading this month:

“Nothing stops him”: A look into the life of Don Andrews, a local triathalete that specializes in the Ironman. I followed Don and his teammates last year as they trained and raised money for “iron DOGS 4 kids”.

Although I would love to do an Ironman some day, I haven’t done a whole lot of research. And so it was a bit of an eye opener to read that this guy runs every single day (5:30 AM), then cyles or swims for a couple of hours on top of that. (I find running 3 times a week to be lots!)

As he talks about his recent race in Lake Placid, it becomes evident how gruelling an Ironman can be:

Then he hit the wall. Thirty kilometres into the runn, driven by exhaustion, his body began to shut down. Unable to speak or hear, Andrews was reduced to a walk, questioning whether he could even finish. “I was ready to check myself in to an ambulance.” Eating and drinking constantly to rebuild his energy, Andrews walked five kilometres before a passing racer coached him back into the race. Pointing out a shadow that lay across the road, he told Andrews, “When you get to that shadow, you’re running”.

A couple of weekends ago, while I was doing some raking with church friends, a man that I hadn’t met before was talking about his son-in-law’s experience running the Ironman. He said that the swim and cycle portions were ok, but that the run was gruelling. After barely being able to complete the race, his son in law vowed never to do it again. He was helped into a car and taken immediately to a hotel to sit in an ice bath. It was a full two months before he had fully recovered.

On the other end of the spectrum, Meredith has a contact in the financial world that speaks of Ironmans as if they were pretty straightforward. When I chatted with him in Toronto one evening, he said that once you’ve done an Ironman, you realize that they’re really not all that difficult. Likewise, my sister Hannah knows of an older lady who started doing Ironmans in her 50s or 60s and has done one every year for a number of years.

So there are definitely some mixed messages out there!