Work hard, lose weight, win contests

I will probably never be mistaken for a "gym rat". I don't mean that because of my appearance, simply the hours I spend training will probably never have anyone label me as someone who loves to work out. 

Sure, unlike a year ago today, I no longer hate running. I'm still not any good at it, but I don't completely hate it. Because I have a lot of things that I am slightly innately talented in, when I'm not good at something I usually don't put in the effort to get better at it. That's why though I am still quite slow, I'm also fairly proud of the fact that I continue to work on my running. 

Last night, I went to the gym to run; it rained a lot yesterday and there's no point in getting my new running shoes wet just for training. Week 4 of my Couch to 5k has 16 minutes of running in a 30 minute period. Last night, I did 2.5 miles in the 30 minutes. That's about what I have previously been able to do at race pace, but these workouts are include a fair amount of recovery (aka not fast) walking in between runs. My goal is still to be able to run a 30 minute 5k, and I'm making progress.

I followed that run up with a 42 minute swim. I had originally planned to swim for an hour with a goal of breaking 2100 yards inside the hour. Rach let me know before we left the house that she was planning on us swimming this morning, so I backed off last night and only did 1500 yards. I was on pace to be very close to 2100 inside an hour. I did a 300 yd warm up, then did 12x100 with 15 seconds rest each lap. I didn't do any cool downs, because my last couple hundred were plenty slow anyways.

I ate ok yesterday. Not great, but ok. I did a bit of stress eating, and I need to cut that out. Between a tough day at work, and learning Rachelle's brother will likely be in the hospital until at least Wednesday, and may need surgery to repair the problem with his lung, it was a tough day. Not only may Alex need surgery, but even without the surgery, he and Rachelle's dad may not be able to join us for the planned trip to the Frozen Four this weekend, which would really stink. We don't get to see them often enough as it is, and with Rach's dad and I becoming lawbreakers together (we trespassed on train tracks at the women's frozen four to get a good look at some trains), I am hopeful we can get into more mischief this weekend. 

Even with the only average eating, I still lost another pound, which means 5 pounds in a little over a week. My portion control is now to the point where I'm getting hungry between meals again, and needing small snacks to get through the day.

Oh, and the last thing; I won a contest. This will surprise almost no one who is a regular reader. This mornings tweets testify to this fact. First is the Loving the Bike tweet congratulating me, following by Bengi's response:

Name redacted to protect the funny...

So what did I win and how did I win it? Loving the Bike had a contest sponsored by Grease Monkey Wipes. They wanted to see "dirty pictures" of people with their bikes. I've only really been truly dirty on my bike a couple of times, and thankfully I have some good pictures from the Landmine Classic where I took a header and got covered in dirt. Here was my winning entry:

I think they just really liked my smile

People have often asked me how I am so lucky; some of that I can't control, but the one thing I can control is that I make the effort to enter. You can't win if you don't play. In this case I won a canister and a box of Grease Monkey Wipes. Now I don't have to worry about Rach's reaction when she sees me carrying the bike into the bathtub.