May proved to be more of a struggle to keep things at a high level of performance. Some things, like a COVID relapse causing me to be more cautious on ramping up working out, explain part of it. Some things are me trying to transform my working out into something more focused on running performance but with side effects. Others are me just feeling more slack this month. Overall it wasn’t horrible but it wasn’t at the level I have been at.

April was supposed to be an easier month for me. That turned out to be kind of true. Goal Accountability grades definitely reflect that. I’m happy with the performance.

I’ve been wanting to write this post for a few months now. Each time I want to commit it to “paper” I’m afraid I’m going to jinx myself by actually writing it down. My primary focus when it comes to exercise is extending my healthspan. Everything else is secondary to that. I can’t deny, though, that I get a charge out of distance running. I love the personal competition aspect. I love seeing how my body can adapt to the challenges. I like having a sense of accomplishment when I succeed. I like spending time doing the planning, tracking, and analysis. If at some point it interferes with my longevity/healthspan goals I’ll stop. In the mean time though I am enjoying being able to rejoin the recreational distance running world in a way I thought may have been solely a brief moment of my past. While I try to approach it with daily/weekly goals for personal satisfaction I can’t help but think about larger goals to target as well. In this post I want to lay out short and long term goals. If I achieve none of them but still stay constistent with my fitness regime then I would still be satisfied. Hitting them is just icing on top of that.

When I had my first bout of getting into running in the 2011/2012 period it was clear to me that I should have some sort of benchmark to measure my progress. While it was possible to measure VO2Max and heart rate zones with an expensive test I didn’t want to rely on that. Instead I devised my own running fitness test that I could repeatably do over time to see changes in my cardiovascular fitness. I am now nearly a year from the beginning of my health reboot and nine months since starting to incorporate running into that. I have been doing running training pretty consistently since August. It started off as relatively high intensity running workouts. Starting in October I shifted to a very Zone 2, low heart rate zone, style of training. After slacking off a bit in the end of year holiday period I buckled down starting at the end of January. I’ve been making slow but study progress ever since.

For years I’ve wondered if I could ever get to those cardiovascular fitness highs again. With this very different training style than what I applied before I was thinking I may be sacrificyng shorter term “faster” cardio performance levels for better base building. Having now performed the test again I think I actually am getting both at the same time. In fact I think I am almost at the same performance I was at in my best trained times.

I knew going into March that there would be challenges meeting or exceeding how well I did in February. The month was as full of travel and stressors as I had anticipated, maybe even more so. I’m pleased to report that while I didn’t maintain my February good grades across the board I was able to keep it together more than I did in January.

In today’s example of “this is why I blog”: as I implement Zone 2 training for doing distance running again I was lamenting not having done so for my 2013 marathon training. According to my race recap post it turns out I did implement Zone 2 training. Well, I thought I had anyway. Looking back over the data however it is pretty clear that I did not. That’s not just a question of my race performance, where I threw all of that to the wind anyway, but also looking at the training data from that era as well.

February was a lot stronger showing than January, especially in the diet department. Whether I can keep that momentum moving forward into a much more difficult March will be the challenge.

I’m a bit late on my closeout/kickoff for the goal accountability but here we have it. So how did I do with meeting my goals for January and what are my plans for goals for February?

At the beginning of the month I did a week long “water” fast meant to potentially reduce my life-long cancer risk. The methodology I was trying for was described in this kick-off post . With now two weeks of data for the period afterward I can fully document how successfully the fast went and what the effects were on my immediately measurable and tracked biomarkers. What is impossible to do is determine if this is actually doing anything to reduce my cancer risk. That’s something that will at best be determined over time. It’s anti-climactic I know. The “results” question for me in the immediate term is if I’ve crafted a fasting protocol that works for me with minimal side effects.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a doctor, trainer, dietitian, nutritionist, or any other expert in any related field. I’m talking about my amateur and anecdotal experiences here and none of this should replace expert medical advice.

It’s about time for me to ramp up my second week long fasts. I developed this for my own needs and did the first try of it back in July, as documented here . For this second round I’m going to be tweaking some things based on lessons learned from my first attempt. Below I’ll outline everything again and the changes I’m making to it.

The usual disclaimer applies: I am not a doctor, trainer, dietitian, nutritionist, or any other expert in any related field. I’m talking about my amateur and anecdotal experiences here and none of this should replace expert medical advice.