Expanding Abilities and Waistlines

PT has begun. I’m trying to dedicate myself to recovery exercises just as I would training for an event…but it’s hard to think about it that way.

Every day, I walk a little better. On Mother’s Day, I was able to hit Lady Bird Lake for the first time in months with my friend Stacey. I went my maximum (30 minutes); Stacey had to slow a little bit for me, but not as much as she would have had to a week or so ago. On Monday, I went for my first “real” PT session. There were some nerves (would it hurt?) and a lot of curiosity.

I forget (as do most of us who do all this trail-ultra-tri-marathon running stuff) how MUCH my body can do and at what a high performance level I MAKE it work at. It’s such a weird sensation to work my ankle to the point of exhaustion and literally feel nothing anywhere else. It’s very frustrating to be told “no” to activities that I completely took for granted a few months ago. Clearly, I’m addicted to my ultra runner’s burn.

So as one would expect, months of relative (and actual) inactivity have caused me to gain weight. This is really, really hard for me. The negative self-talk on this is high. I feel as though I am eating nothing but I can’t drop a pound of this to save my life. It’s becoming obvious that I need to go to some completely iron-fisted management of my food intake in order to be able to start running at a good weight. Actually, in order for me to be happy with the way my body looks when I’m not running.

It’s clear that I’ve relied on a heavy dose of exercise to keep my weight under control. At my height and age and with my body type, I don’t think I have any room for fudge when it comes to daily calories. I just wish I could see some kind of success here soon that would help me recognize that there is a reward for all the focus. It’s like my food allergy maintenance and running:  I never really had an issue because I immediately got the reward. If I didn’t follow those dietary restrictions, the kind of running I like to do was not an option. So I haven’t really felt deprived. However, I can’t seem to find the right balance now with food, a balance that rewards me with weight loss when exercise is out of the picture.

It seems like in a simple matter of calories-in, calories-out, at some point I should lose weight. But I have a sneaking suspicion that my body has learned over the last years to be very efficient with its calorie burn and that the equation is just not so simple anymore.