Raising the Bar to a Marathon

Time flies! Doesn’t it? Another month and a new monthly report to go. In terms of weight loss, June was not very fruitful. I have lost a total of 3kgs / 6.5lbs getting down to 95 kgs / 210 lbs. The second week of the month, I got sidetracked with my diet. You can see the huge weight spike in the graph. I know it looks crazy how fast I was able to put weight on and off just in a couple of weeks. My argument for that pace is that it is mostly water weight and glycogen stores in muscles. When you diet for a long time, you tend to deplete those stores. Once you have a surplus coming in, your body tends to store carbs in glycogen stores and in the liver in combination with water. Otherwise, there is no way to store 3-4 kgs / 7-9 lbs of fat in just a week and lose it equally fast. That is my explanation based on my highly scientific experiences 😁 Anyways, I still consider June a success considering there is progress in weight loss.

My cardio workouts went according to my plan. I have doubled my 6 km regular runs to 12 km. I added one long run per week and hit the longest on the 25th with an 18km run. From a distance and overall volume perspective, June is a success towards my end-of-August half marathon goal. The last week of the month, I decided to step back for a week to give my body some recovery time and rolled back to regular 10km runs. Once the recovery week is over, I will go back to 12 km regulars and potentially increase to 14 at some point. My goal is to get one of my long runs to 21, which is the half marathon distance I’m chasing. Meanwhile, I keep increasing the volume and adding variety to my training, maybe with some fartlakes.

The Marathon Running Plan

Yes, it’s happening. Who would have guessed? Now that I’m feeling relatively comfortable with my half-marathon goal, I’m raising the bar. I registered for the Istanbul Marathon on the 7th of November 2022. That will be a full 42.2 km run. I have around four months to prepare. That should be more than enough as long as everything goes as planned 😊 Well, we will see.

Sleep and Food

When it comes to my diet, I’m still doing an intermitted fasting diet with a single large meal during the first half of the day. It is usually a big meal after the morning fasted cardio.

On the sleep side, I had to reschedule my wake-up time to 5.30 AM to give me enough time to land the longer runs I wanted. The change cut my average sleep time from 7 hours to 6h 40 minutes. I have to push for an earlier sleep time, but I am not sure if I can make that happen. I will see how things will shape. A 20-minute cut might not affect my well-being and performance, but I might need to reconsider things if the amount gets larger.

Recovery

Now that my runs are getting longer and I’m targeting longer races, I also started focusing on my recovery. I was looking for some post-run rehab exercises and just received the news that Strava acquired Recover Athletics. This was great news as I already had a Premium Strava account and would also receive free Recover Athletics access. So far, I have tried the rehab sessions for two weeks, and I can clearly say it does help speed up recovery and decrease the overall muscle pain left after long runs. I’m planning to add some compression socks and potentially leg sleeves soon to support my leg muscles. I will report back next month with my experiments and findings for sure.

With that, it’s a wrap for June. Make sure you hit me on Twitter if you are joining the races I’m planning to attend. See you next month!