Blessed

It's been an interesting week.

So, I resumed tracking my calories on MyFitnessPal on January 4th. That first week and a half was great and by Friday the 13th I was down 6.6 from my weight on January 1st. Needless to say I was quite ecstatic with this.

Last week I was exercising like a fiend. It wasn't necessarily on purpose, but more so because that's just how my workouts happened to fall. Here's what my week looked like exercise-wise:

• Sunday: Walk 3 miles (I didn't have anything on the schedule Sunday, but I decided to just walk on the treadmill leisurely). 
• Monday: Run 5 miles in the morning; an hour of Jazzercise in the evening.
• Tuesday: Run 3 miles in the morning; an hour strength class in the afternoon. 
• Wednesday: Jazzercise in the evening.
• Thursday: Run 3 miles in the morning; strength class in the afternoon. 

If you're counting, that's 8 workouts in 5 days. Needless to say I was burning tons of calories. MFP adds those workout calories to your daily target so my target was pretty insane most days. I didn't even come close to eating all my "allowed" calories on the days that I ran and did another workout. 

You can imagine how incredibly frustrated I was when I saw the scale creeping up during the week. By Friday (the day that I had decided to be my "official" weigh in day) my weight was UP 2.2 pounds from the previous Friday! W.T.F!?!?!?! 

Ok. So LOGICALLY I KNOW to just stay the course and it will come off. My body will catch up with what I'm doing and I'll have a great week where I just drop a bunch of weight. I also know that working out as much as I did this past week will result in some major water retention (especially since I incorporate weight training). But none of that makes it any easier to see THAT much of a gain when you feel like you've been working so hard. 

That dreaded scale. I've blogged about it several times before. That scale can sabotage me regardless of how I'm using it (every day, once a week, attempting to do once a month, etc). Seeing those numbers go up this week made me once again think that perhaps I need to just stay off the scale for a while and focus on what I'm doing. IT'S JUST SO HARD!! I mean, I am doing this because I just like how I feel when I'm more active. But, I also want to lose this damn weight. I want to see what I can do fitness wise when I'm actually at a "healthy" weight. That makes it hard to NOT focus on what the scale is doing. 

But then today happened. 

I got up early and met my friend for our weekly long run. We had 6 miles on the schedule today. I haven't done 6 miles since 2013. And frankly, I think in 2013 I got to about 7 miles into my half marathon training when I got sick again and had to make the decision to NOT do the Columbus half marathon. 

I told Leslie that we had to plan for at least 1 1/2 hours to get the 6 miles done. I haven't been too happy with my run times lately and I didn't want to expect any more for this one. I was also thinking that in the past I had taken close to that time to finish a 10k so it seemed appropriate to me. You can imagine my excitement when we finished in 1:24. 

But it wasn't even just that. I was actually able to put aside any negative feelings I was having before this morning and feel GRATEFUL that I was ABLE to get up early this morning and run these 6 miles. Was it tough? Of course it was. But I can't express how awesome I felt at 8:30 this morning when I completed the first 6 miles since 2013. What the scale says no longer mattered. I go back to thinking; man, look at what my body CAN do! 

I am sure there will be more times when the scale ticks me off. For today though, I don't care what that scale says. On to next week. The only day I have 2 workouts in one day will be Thursday when I am scheduled to run 3 miles and then have my workout class in the afternoon. Hopefully the scale will decide to reward me for my continued efforts. In the meantime, my official half marathon training starts this week! 17 weeks and I WILL be crossing the finish line of my 5th half marathon. An enormous thanks to my friend, Leslie....without her I wouldn't be where I am today and I wouldn't be talking about my 5th half marathon in 17 weeks either!