Nearing the End of my goal.

 

I have been blogging about my journey for 4 months very inconsitently but that is the start of my journey. I have lost the weight I wanted to lose and I am very happy about that. I have not tried on the pants that were my goal to fit into yet but I think they are going to fit now. I had a friend over that I have not seen in a few months because life gets in the way of things sometimes and she told me fairly bluntly that I need to get rid of the belt and all the pants I had in the size I was wearing. "They don't fit you at all anymore and it looks sloppy like your in hand me down cloths as an Adult." I did not aware that my clothing might fit very poorly after losing 25 LB or so in 4 months but they really do not fit at all. She is right on how my clothing fits right now, I look sloppy even though my phisical body looks better the clothing makes me look bad. This is a bit of a problem as most of my clothing is now too big for me because I replaced all my regular pants, shirts, and things over the years of working from home after covid. That was the start of when I stopped fitting in my work pants and I have not bught any more work clothing as I work remote now so I figured at the start of the journey that fitting in those old work pants would be a good goal. I still think that this is and was a good goal to set and I am not going to stop the exercising journey once I confirm I fit in those pants. I am going to change my goals and keep on keeping on. 

What do new goals look like for me though? I am not sure where to start with a goal that is more pointed than fit in to pants. I don't want or care to set something about a physical body shape or look such as getting six pack abs. This is not to say I would not like the six pack ab look but that is not something I think I could keep a goal for. Even in reading about people who are trying to obtain that look it seems like a lot gimmics or not real methods that might work but seem bad. I am being vague about the program names or the type of things becuase it is not worth your time to hear about it and google it to be lead down a similar rabbit hole that I went down reading about it. Most of it seems like bad diet science and bad excersice rutines that will end up hurting you in the long run. So if I get six pack abs it would be becuase of the regular workouts I do and blog about. Now one of the main reasons I don't want to set six pack abs as a goal other than I don't care a ton about vanity body shapes is that one thing I read almost everywhere is you have to lower your body fat to below 15 percent or so and as I have stated I like to eat food far too much to shave off that much more body fat. Plus in past reading about the percent you see on my scale screenshots its mostly just a guess anyway so even if I were to set a goal there it would be a guess on the scales part and it would end up leading me to failure. I think a more obtainable goal would be setting distances for running and biking as well as progess in lifting. The progress in lifing would be based around the weight of the lifts not the shape of the body part so I would not measure my arm size to get to a 20 inch bicep or what ever I would put a goal more like get to 150 LB bench in 3 months. That is just an example not a goal I am setting right now. 

Lets look at my most recent bike ride and make a goal for bike riding to start. I end up almost always taking this route and going 19 miles which is mostly paved trails and hard packed dirt. I do not feel bad after riding this distance and I feel like I could go longer or faster. The average speed on this ride was lower because I was stopping more than normal for people on the path and traffic at the few streets was worse than normal because it was a very nice day out so people were out and about. Thinking about some goals here by end of September or the start of October I think hitting a 100 mile ride is the goal there. With rough bad calculations if I could do that ride right now it would take me 7-8 hours on the bike. I do not think I could ride my bike for 8 hours right now and feel okay that would be far too long and I am still not in good enough shape to do that. So in 3 months get myself into that shape and do a 100 mile ride as a goal for the bike riding. I would set something for speed but that can depend on other people such as how the roads are or if there are people on the trail that day and I am not going to be rude to other just so I can go faster. 

I don't have any recent runs on the treadmil to share becuase I have been getting out on the bike and my kids got me sick with some cold so the past week has been no runs but loking at my numbers on prior runs I can do a 5k in about 35 minutes and 10k in a little over an hour and 10 minutes. I end up walking for part of the 10k becuase I overheat quick once I get past around 6k so I have slow down and bring my heart rate down to not overheat. I want to be realistic in what I will be able to get done here as well I don't want to get up a goal like an ultra marathon that I would never be able to get done as I can't even run a marathon yet. This goal is going to be a bit more conservative than the bike goal as I have more time to get it done so before the new year I think I will set my goal as a marathon. I will not be able to bike as much when the cold snowy winter comes so I will end up moving more to running on the treadmil and getting to a marathon end of december seems reasonable if not a bit hard. I might fail at this one but I will be willing to push the goal post a bit for it as I would have all winter to fix my goal and get out there and get it done. 

I am off to continue the journey! I will confirm the pants fit next post! Have a wonderful day and thank you very much for reading!