Doing a Hundred

I've been running off and on for a few years now, but after my weight ballooned to 82.4 kg in February of this year, I decided that I needed to stop faffing about and get serious.

It is now 8 months later. I am now running an average of 5 kilometers a day, 5 days a week. I've been supplementing that with swimming and working out with weights. I've lost roughly 11-ish kilograms (some days it's more, some days it's less). The BMI scale says that I'm still overweight, but I'm no longer obese. And this month, for the first time, I've run a hundred kilometers.

It's been hard, I'm not going to lie. My day is built up around the children, so I wake up ever earlier to make sure I can get my running out of the way before I wake them up for breakfast before I drive them to school. It works out with their bed-time, because if I'm waking up at 4:30 a.m., then I'm as sleepy as they are when it's 9 o'clock at night.

I've persevered through kidney stones, pulled muscles on my knees and ankles, and probably the harshest summer we've had in recent years. I'd cut down on how much I'd run, but I never allowed myself to stop entirely, because if you skip a day for a good reason, you'll skip a day for a bad one.

I've been counting calories too, because if I'm eating too much, no amount of exercise can burn it off. I've had to give up on crisps, because you literally can't eat just one. I've cut down on biscuits. I'll snack, but I'll snack on vegetables, and nuts, and dry muesli. And of course, I need to keep drinking water, because if I allow myself to get the least bit dehydrated, I risk more kidney stones.

As a result, now none of the clothes I've bought in the past few years fit. I usually had to buy larger jeans, and then have the lengths adjusted because I'm so short, but now I could literally have another person fit into the waistbands. The shirts aren't too bad, but the suits look like I've borrowed them from a pair of conjoined twins.

But the nice bit is that any physical activity is now easy. If we need to go to the shops to pick up one or two things, I'll walk rather than take the car. When my family was switching out their summer wardrobes for their winter things, I carried the suitcases down the stairs without breaking a sweat. When I go to pick up the kids from school, I can carry all three of their schoolbags in one hand, and carry my daughter in the other.

I lack data on when I was last this healthy. I used to ride my bicycle all day and every day back when I was in college, but I didn't weigh myself at all because I didn't need to. I almost never appear in photographs, and I've always worn loose clothing, so I have no idea of how much my stomach bulged (except when it became very obvious). The earliest pictures I have are from 2005, and even there, you can tell that my neck is roughly like George Lucas', and my hips are ballooning out.

The nice thing about running though, is that there's still further that I can go. While I can't do more than 5k during weekdays, I can try to push further on the weekend. The next milestone is being able to run 10 km.

Let's see how long that takes.