Weight: the evil is on the scale

 

I am puzzled by what the scale told me today.

I am a small-framed guy, 1,70m - with the body structure of a university lecturer (but I'm still fit!). Normally I am around 62kg, which hasn't changed for the past 20 years. Since I have been running more regularly for the past few weeks, the scale has started to tilt a little towards the 60 kg mark.

This morning I got up for the Fremantle 10km, as planned. I thought I was in decent shape, and could have done something in the 35mins region.. The course was flat, the weather good. Usual ridiculously early start (can Australians ever conceive of organising a run that starts at 10am, at least in the winter?), so I was up even more ridiculously at 6.30am. before putting on my gears, I jumped on the bathroom scale, old but reliable. Verdict: 66kg!! WTF!! I hadn't run that much in the previous days (in fact, I had rested on 3 out the last 4 days), but I certainly had behaved. Plus, I was on an empty stomach...

After that adrenaline un-booster, I went for my 10km, with my mysterious 4 kg extra carriage. I stopped thinking about it during warm-up, the legs were feeling OK after a couple days of rest. But the performance wasn't great: I took off too fast, ended up dragging myself between 5 and 8 km, run mostly on my own... I should have done at last 90secs less on the overall time.

A few days ago I found an interesting link, which shows how you would have performed on the same distance had your weight been different. I don't know how they do it, nor if it's true, but it feels good to look at it. Like, if I had been my normal weight today, I would have run in 35 minutes.

So, for the next 4 weeks, I will run the following scale-experiment on myself. I will not try to get particularly creative with training plans/strategies etc. I will simply aim at shaving some excess weight off. Running early in the morning, before breakfast (hoping my kids will let me sleep at night); avoiding sugary tricky stuff (btw, I will have to write a specific post on that. The list of 'stuff you should avoid' is almost infinite!); swapping from cappuccino/lattes to coffee only, and avoiding wine (the "light beer" option will probably stay, or I'll get depressed). I will keep me posted.