Racing weight

I thought I'd see how my efforts to get down to racing weight for the Marathon at the end of November were going. When I say "racing weight", the truth of the matter is that I don't have enough experience to say what my true, optimal racing weight should be; I have several references, like what I used to weigh when I was competing in rowing in my teens and early twenties (gulp) and - more realistically - what I weighed when I did my (even if I say so myself) spectacular time in the Half Marathon back at the end of January. I am convinced that the two principal predictors of my running race performance are (1) heat and (2) weight (and in that order).

The start of the graph marks when I first started taking seriously this business of counting calories. Then, as you can see, I focused on training for my Ironman which had a by product of making me heavier, especially in the upper body, but also in the legs. So I got back down to it again at the end of July starting from the impressive heights of over 90 kilos and have more or less steadily been whittling away the weight at the same rate as before. Except, that is, for that anomaly, which corresponds to the two weeks holiday in the US. To be fair, that was probably due to water retention, bloating and god-knows-what from the long journey and let lag and so on, as it came back down to where it should have been pretty quickly.

The red dot is where I am aiming to get to - 82 kilos (which will be the lightest I have been in well over ten years) by the end of November. I think it is feasible while at the same time getting in enough energy to fuel my training safely.