Well, I've plonked out of the blogging for a little while now, but I hit another mark in my log book, so it's time for another diet and exercise update. Weight is still going down, although not as fast as I would want it to, in general. The exercise is going pretty great, and I have some exciting stuff coming up in the near future. Overall, I have been pretty happy about how I feel, look and weigh in the last month.

Looking at the last month or so graph is pretty interesting to me. There is a lot of strange patterns going on here. I don't know what the heck is going on, that there seems to be a pattern of me gaining weight and then followed by a precipitous drop down to a new low. The trend continued today when I reached my lowest weight, only one pound away from my (modest) goal for the year. Some of the points on the upper end of these sawtooth type patterns are above my weighted average line and pull it up, but most are still below, and the linear estimate still shows a caloric deficit. The year graph still looks good, even though it is more roller-coastery than I would like.

My running habit has been getting a little more serious, and I've been feeling pretty good about it. The training schedule I've been on in the last few months has been working pretty good, although I am thinking that it might be less of a training schedule and just more like a running schedule in the last couple weeks. I like the routes that I am on, though. I have been increasing the lengths of my long walks on Sunday for a little bit, and I really extended them this month. I've done about 10 miles or a little more on the walks in the last three weeks. The extended range of these walks feels pretty good, trouncing all around the city and reaching places that I haven't been able to get at before.

Running has been getting faster, and now I'm running consistently at around 9:30 per mile or faster. I lowered the amount of time that I am walking on my run / walk interval runs. I am thinking that I will be lowering the walking by a lot, and cutting it out completely possibly, in the next couple of weeks though. Lots of you I'm sure see my Dailymile profile posts to Twitter and Facebook though.

Last month I have been starting to get serious about doing at least a couple of races this year, just mostly for fun and to have something to aim towards. Well, my big news this month is that I have signed up and will run a 5K race next week. This is more of a race to get me used to races, or to do a smaller length race before I do something more serious later in the year. I've signed up for the Goldy's Run 5K and will be aiming towards a time under half an hour. I regularly run intervals which are much longer than that, so it shouldn't be a problem to finish and hopefully get a good time. I've never run with a lot of people before - not really with anyone before, so I am wondering how I will react when there are a lot of people around actually running a race. I initially considered signing up for the 10 mile race, but it was probably a little more ambitious to think about doing that only two weeks before the race when I was only walking that distance.

I also have decided that I want to run a half marathon before the year is out, and I don't really want to do it in the winter, so I've set myself a goal to run the Red, White and Boom! TC half marathon on the 4th of July. Luckily I've made this decision basically at the exact right time. I've found a 12 week novice training schedule online, and I am about exactly 12 weeks out from the race day. So I'm starting on the training schedule this Wednesday and following it closely. It starts with less running than I am used to, so I am modifying it a little to keep the total amount of miles that I cover about the same. I am a little worried because I usually am walking sections when I am running, and I will need to find some other routes that are slightly longer than I run now. I don't want to overdo it, but I have been pretty good at listening to my body about changes. Wish me luck.