There’s a run in Somerville coming up called The Mystic River Herring Run — we don’t have a lot of herring around here, so I don’t know where the name comes from. http://www.mysticriver.org

In any case, it turns out five kilometers is 3.1 miles. Several times this week I’ve done 20 minutes on the eliptical machine, followed by 10 minutes on a bike and five minutes on a treadmill. Well, five minutes was clearly all I could handle because afterwards I was exhausted. I felt really good but I was completely tapped. I had nothing left. I worked hard on both machines before getting to the treadmill and I managed to job half a mile.

In five minutes.

I know that’s not very good, but believe it or not I find it very encouraging!

I could actually run for half a mile! To me, that’s quite an achievement! The kicker is that I managed to do this AFTER kicking my ass for 30 mintues on two other machines.

I should be able to walk a mile in 15 minutes. Lets say I can jog somewhat faster than I can walk — say, in 12 minutes. If I jog three miles, that would be a total of 36 minutes, which is still within the timeframe in which I’ve been exercising.

See, my concern is that I won’t be able to exert myself long enough and hard enough to be able to complete one of these things. And at least for the next few months I’m not even going to try. I think I would hurt myself. But these are benchmarks I can use while I’m working out so I’ll know if I’m ready to try one of these things.

Yesterday, after exercising in the afternoon, I weighed in at 261! I always lose 3 or 4 pounds of sweat when I exercise, so I guess my actual weight is something closer to 265.

Still too heavy to run five kilometers, but I should be available for races next spring!

I started off writing that last line feeling pumped and optimistic.

Now I’m looking at it thinking how lame that is.

Right now I seem to be losing about 10 pounds a month — 2.5lbs per week, which is pretty aggressive and its taking a lot of work. I don’t know how long I can keep it up. Ugh.

I should probably get back to work.

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