Breakthrough

Today is Day 15 of 90, and I have so much good news to report, I don't know where to begin.

After the first week of clean eating didn't yield much, I decided to switch back to my old birth control pills.  I'd changed brands 5 weeks earlier because the new ones were free "preventative care" with my insurance, and I had reasoned that saving $20+/month would add up to a couple of pairs of shoes a year.  The new ones were supposed to be similar to the old, but my weight loss froze when I started taking them.  After talking with a friend about her experience, I began to suspect this might be the culprit.  Something my brother also said stuck in my head: as much as you've put into training for this marathon, why would you not do EVERYTHING you can to do your best?  Was I really willing to risk my sub-4 goal because I wasn't willing to spend $60 for 3 months worth of pills???  Within 5 days of switching back, I was down 8 pounds!  Holy cow!  I broke through the barrier and started seeing a new set of numbers on the scale--numbers I haven't seen since I was a kid!  Yay!

It's not just the numbers on the scale that are changing.  I remember when the idea of being a size 2 was just a fantasy, a hopefully-someday-maybe (but probably not really).  Now I am easily a size 2--and some things that size are too big for me...what???  Again and again, I'm reminded that my God can do "more than we can ask or imagine," and this definitely qualifies.

I'm so excited to see how my hard work is paying off, and now that it is, I'm able to be grateful for being stuck.  I never would have taken my eating to the next level if what I was doing before was still working.  Now that I've started, I still want to see it all the way through to MCM, so in the long run (no pun intended), this will be good for me.  :)

I've had a breakthrough on the training side as well.  Yesterday's run was originally scheduled as a 12-mile run with tempo work, but I modified it and went a full 13.1.  I was a bit handicapped by my Garmin going down (again!) but used my old Polar HR monitor and Jog Log on my phone.  My aim was to do a "racy" rainbow run:

Mile 1: Blue (150s)
Miles 2-3: Green (160s)
Miles 4-10: Yellow (170s)
Miles 11-13.1: Orange (180s)

My hope was to find the sweet spot between pushing myself too hard and not enough and develop a strategy that I can use for the Hottest Half coming up in 2 weeks.  I felt good until the very end, though the longer I was out in the heat, the slower the pace the same heart rate yielded, generally speaking.  The yellow zone is comfortably hard for me, and I could probably hold there for more than 7 miles.  Orange is uncomfortably hard, and I was glad I didn't have more than 3 to do in that range.  As the 10-mile mark approached, I had to overcome a mental barrier to make myself push harder for those last 3, but doing so allowed me to spend enough time in that zone to get stronger (and accustomed to the uncomfortable sensation) without blowing apart as I have on some previous runs.  I'm learning!

According to Polar, my time was 2:01:15 - my best by a healthy margin and a time I haven't even come close to since Heels & Hills in May.  If you believe Jog Log (which I'm not sure I do), I may have even broken the 2-hour mark...

Either way, it's a PR by several minutes, and I'll take it!  This is a big confidence booster going into the race in 2 weeks, and hopefully all I need is a little tweaking to create the perfect race day strategy...