Sitting at a breakfast table with coffee and cocoa calculating what a calorie restricted diet would result into after 16 weeks. 13 weeks would be enough to reach my target weight. There’s reason behind this madness. I need this weight to prevent hitting the wall in a marathon race.

Last run for this week, 21 km (almost a half marathon distance), slow and easy in 2 h 20 min. I wanted a steady pace, no muscle soreness, nor tiredness afterwards. I got two of those three; still tired afterwards. It’s 16 weeks to go before M-day 🏃

I went from 33 to 31 percent body fat in one week by limiting my diet to one healthy warm meal per day, lots of low-caloric fluids and 31 km of running. I need to go to 18 % to prevent hitting the wall in a marathon race, having to walk the last 10 km of the 42 km distance. 🏃

I didn’t have to go for a run to see something of beauty 🦋 Still, the run was nice too, in the Golden Hour, no less 🏃

Turns out that my lean body mass (everything except fat) is 57 kg, while fit male individuals have 18 - 24 % body fat, runners 10 % less than that. I’m shedding weight by the week now, just by running regularly and thinking about the marathon later this year. 🏃

New resistance band day. It makes weight-free strength exercises somewhat more challenging. Start light, though. I’m not yet a black belt workout person, just a casual one. So there’s that, too: room to grow (muscle strength).

My morning route has been extended by 30 minutes by 🏃 strength and mobility exercises. Like coach Kyle Kranz says:

Every day should be hip-day.

That’s the body part, in case you wondered.

I can see from the graph that body weight and resting heart rate have a relationship. As I lost weight (93 - 85 kg = 8 kg), my resting HR dropped (60 - 48 bpm = 12 bpm) in just 3 months. To me, this is encouraging, as a sign of increased fitness. I’m still overweight, though. 🩺

I’m temporarily back on Strava, just because I’m preparing for a marathon later this year. After that, it’s probably lights out again for me (read: disconnect Garmin Connect from Strava). I did prune who I follow, though, to keep me sane. 🏃

Second week running in a group of about 20 athletes of varied levels. This time I was the fastest, and much faster as well. Felt great. My regular group has some who are much faster than me. I’ll be joining them in September. 🏃

Currently reading: Het Geheim van Hardlopen by G. Vroemen, J.C. van Dijk, J.G.W. van Megen 📚🇳🇱

I totally underestimated my running speed in this LT training session. I thought 10 km was enough, yet needed almost 12 km. I ran almost 14 km at 6:13 min/km (10 min/mi). I need to reconsider my 15 km race pace. 🏃

Gardening takes more effort than I expected. Vegetable gardening ten times more, it seems. Removed the (unproductive) strawberry plants that turned into weeds through (my) neglect of tending them. 🌱

I did an interval training, 5 series of tempos over 100, 200, 300 and 400 m (interval 100 m, series interval 400 m). The graph shows my watch’s recorded running data. The target pace for the tempos was 5:15 - 5:30 min/km (8:27 - 8:51 min/mi); actual paces were faster, though. 🏃

I suppose I should be proud to be part of the open Web, especially if I’m paying Wordpress almost €70 a year for ad-free hosting and (especially) a domain name. So I expressed the pride as follows on my English language About page of my Dutch language blog—without the ❤️

I’m seeing so many runners I know personally who stopped blogging 10 years ago when they discovered Facebook. Now their activities are invisible, unless you use Facebook. Such a pity, throwing away blogs for convenience. When FB goes 😵 so will their messages and proud memories.

Google Sites classic is going away, and it offered a conversion to its new version. In my case, it failed. So I had to grab the HTML text from the source code, and edit it by hand into markdown. That goes to show that HTML is not future-proof. Done on my iPad. Page is now on WP.

A Howdy notification from Wordpress:

These plugins are now up to date:

• JSON Feed (from version 1.4.1 to 1.4.2)

Thanks @manton

Major 🏃 effort (for me), 23+ km long slow distance run around Air Base Woensdrecht. It was my longest continuous run since 2018. The last 5 kms were brutal. Next weekend 2 km more.

I accidentally deleted a workout from Garmin Connect (GC). Luckily, it was still on my watch, so I grabbed my (powered) USB camera connection kit and dragged the .fit file right into the file upload section of the GC website, by putting Files and Safari side-by-side on the iPad.