This one's a fighter

Yesterday morning I had my alarm set for 6:30 so I could get my four mile run in before going to my Tuesday job which is nannying for three month old twins. It is the highlight of my week, I wish I could do it full time. I hit snooze once but I was wide awake at 6:45. Did I get up and go to the gym? No, of course I didn’t. I stayed in bed until 9. However, I would like to very triumphantly say that I did go to the gym at 5pm, ran four miles in 54 minutes and realized why I like to go in the morning. There are way too many people at the gym after work. The run felt so good, I really felt like I could have run another mile. And before the run I was cranky and afterwards my mood had completely shifted. I don’t know if it was “runner’s high” or what but I felt so good.

I read a blog called Runs for Cookies. Katie is about my age and in 2009 she lost 125 pounds. She’s now an avid runner, she’s completed two marathons and countless half marathons. She posts almost every day and she has a lot of knowledge and experience to share. I’ve been wanting to reach out to her for a while but for some reason I just never emailed her. This weekend I decided to send her an email expressing my frustration about my weight going up the last two weeks despite all the running I’m doing, thinking she might have some insight. It turns out the Weight Watchers leader I spoke to on Friday afternoon isn’t as full of it as I thought. Katie pointed me to this post she wrote a few years ago when she started running again after recovering from surgery. I still feel frustrated but I don’t feel quite as terrible about the whole thing.

This is part of what she wrote to me:

”Most likely, your muscles are holding onto extra water because of the exercise (they need that water to store the glycogen in your muscles, which is what gives your muscles the energy to move). Extra movement = extra glycogen = extra water. I discovered that I'm always carrying around about 5-8 pounds of extra water... if I stop exercising completely for a week, I drop about 5-8 pounds! When I start exercising again, I gain it right back. But I know, logically, that it's just water weight, and has nothing to do with my body fat or the size of my body.”

So I learned something new, something important to know. She also said it could take a few weeks for my body to get used to running before I see a weight loss.