Running in the dark and the sore throat
12K in the dark, with a headlamp, in a forest… what can go wrong? Nothing did, except this only photo, I have from the race not looking like a photo from a race! Besides that, It was crazy fun and surprisingly peaceful.
The exciting news for the month is “The Sore Throat”! To be honest, I had some other health news popping up this month, but I will keep those in my backlog until the story is complete. Back to the sore throat!
This is how my month looks now. Everything was pretty cool until the 18th. That’s when I decided the pain in my throat is increasing. You know the feeling. It is not going to get better. So, I stopped exercising but kept my 2000 cal/day to see if anything will improve. Being on the deficit during sickness is not good. Removing exercise should give some leeway for the body to use the calories for recovery. That’s precisely what happened. It took me a week, but next Monday I was all in good shape.
You can’t imagine how hard it was to stop exercising and keep eating the same food. The fear of “Am I getting out of my routine and falling back to my old days?” struck pretty hard. I had to convince myself every day that I’m doing the right thing for my body by letting it recover.
With all that gone, did you notice the change after 23th? Let me explain. I had some plans to change my weekly training regimen starting October. Instead, I decided to use my week off as a reset and implement some change immediately. Unfortunately, I had some issues with my gym access, and I ended up doing mostly cardio for the last week of September :(
The plan
From now on, I will exercise six days a week with a single session every day. There will be no overlapping weight training and cardio sessions in a single day. That will be a total of 3 days of weight training down from 4, and 3 days of cardio down from 4. The total decrease in minutes of exercise is around 80-90 minutes per week. I will see how my current fat loss trend changes based on this new plan and reschedule accordingly if needed. The idea behind this change is to slowly move over to a maintenance phase from an aggressive fat loss plan.
Progress Report
I have lost around 2kgs / 4.lbs weight during September. It is not huge, but pretty good considering my body fat percentage is getting pretty low compared to the old days. I’m expecting the weight loss to go slower for the next couple of months. Unless I put weight back on, I’m not worried about my weight anymore. It is just a data point to interpret how things are going.
In other news, I managed to complete at least one challenge on Strava, Saucony September Sixty! I managed to run 66kms despite my week off and excitedly waiting for my 30% off from Saucony.com purchases coupon! My current shoes are already on 230kms. That coupon will help :)
October might be an exciting month; it all depends on some bloodwork I will get done soon. No spoilers :) Keep reading my monthly updates, and I should come back with the full story around that. See you next month!