So here we are half-way through the year, and a good time for me to check in on my 2008 fitness goals.

Spring Plan Final Report

Just for completeness my reported spring 2008 fitness goal was simple: complete the June Philadelphia Triathlon. I did that the weekend before last.

I’m really excited to be done; the swim was harder than I expected, and I was slow, but I got it done. My bike ride was good; I stuck to my plan and finished feeling fine. Although my run started off badly (my body wasn’t dealing well with ingesting that much water in the river), but, um, once I found a porta-potty, I went from 12-minute-miles to finish that last 3 miles at 8.5 minute miles, sprinting the last quarter-mile at a 7.5 minute mile pace. Total time was 3 hours 20 minutes, but I spent 50 minutes doing the swim, about 10 minutes in transitions, have room to improve in the bike and run, so for the next one I have lots of areas to work on (which is exciting for me).

Midway Report

As a reminder though, that was part of a larger set of 2008 goals outlined in this post. The goals were:

• Complete the Philadelphia Triathlon on June 22th.
• Complete the New York Marathon on November 2^nd.
• Increase my weight to around 175-180 lbs by end of 2008, but keep my waist around 32-inches (i.e. muscle, not fat).

Adjustments

I’ve achieved the first goal on target and now must begin training for the 2^nd goal. I’m currently injury free which is a good place to start.

I’ve learned that the third goal is too aggressive for me (when coupled with the tri and marathon). I just can’t gain that much weight (well, I can, but not gain weight the right way) and train for endurance events at the same time. During the winter I was able to add about 5lbs of muscle, but it took a lot of really hard work to even do that. So I’m going to pare my goal back to achieving 165-170 lbs by the end of 2008, keeping a 32-inch waist. For completeness, on last weigh-in I was 162 pounds at 11.4% body fat.

I’m also going to try to keep my running ramp slower than last year to hopefully avoid injury and actually show up at the NYC marathon start-line this year.

Summer 2008 Plan

This brings me to my plan for summer of 2008. I need to start my marathon training (which means more running) and I want to prepare for the winter lifting work I’ll do. Right now, I’m at about 11% to 12% body fat, and it’d be nice to run the marathon lighter, and start the winter “bulking” when leaner. So here are the goals:

By 9/30/2008 I will:

• Get my body-fat percentage from 12% to below 10%, with a stretch goal of below 9%.
• Increase my running mile by no more than 10% per week (starting at a base of 10 miles/week), and most importantly, avoid injury.
• Join a new gym in California, and do weight/isometric/cross training on running off-days

As a stretch goal, I may also do the Marin Century (cycling) in August. This is for fun, and I don’t really plan to train for it, so it may kill me. We’ll see, but if I’m worried about marathon injury, I will skip it. Lastly, I have a week in Croatia in about 3 weeks, so no training then.

Winter 2008 Preview

My plan for winter is to switch back to bulking/lifting as my fitness focus, but I also want to get a swim-coach and really work on swimming. If anyone has good recommendations for coaches in San Francisco, please let me know. I’m going to sign-up for at least one more triathlon in 2009 and want to see if I can break the 3-hour mark.

– Art