Bone Marrow Runner

I suppose time has come in my personal life to address the elephant in the room affecting my life and my running.  For a long time I've been a relatively big guy, and over the past year or too my weight has been drifting gradually upwards. In fact when I was psychologically brave enough to step on the scales a month ago my weight had ballooned to 107Kg (235lbs). This was the time that things had to change and I set to work on getting it down.

As far as my running goes, I'm sure there is a lot of room for improvement in my time, in fact if I got down to my ideal weight of 80.7kg I would have lost nearly 25% of my entire body weight. I reckon that there could be some dramatic improvements in my speed and my ability to tolerate more training over the next year.

In the back of my mind, I am not really too sure how this is going to impact on my training for the Berlin marathon. It could really help me out by making the running and cardiovascular effort lower, or on the other hand weaken me so much that I struggle to keep up the runs. Only time will tell, and I will keep you updated over the next few months as to my progress.

To drag myself into losing a lot of weight, there is a two pronged strategy, exercising more (the marathon training should help out here) and eating less. Now this is certainly not as easy to do as it is to write, but I have drafted in my fascination with numerical goals, log keeping and being a bit of a geek to help out. I love keeping an eye on my progress, be it weekly mileage, pace, or pretty little GPS maps of my runs, and I have found calorie counting to be very very useful. I grabbed the Tap & Track app (unsponsored itunes link here) off the iTunes store and got to work with it a few weeks ago. I will try to post a review sometime soon, but in short it allows you to track your calorie intake via a database of food or personally added items and accounts fr your exercise to produce a daily calorie allowance. You can set you ideal weight loss rate, I've gone for 1kg/week, and plug in all the data as you go. The database is all stored on the iPhone, so you don't need wireless or mobile signal for it to work, and I always have the phone with me.

I Haven't been sponsored in any way and I paid the full price on the UK app store, so I will give an unbiased review sometime over the next few weeks.  But for the moment I have already lost 3Kg (now down to 104Kg) in the last month and I'm feeling pretty good!