How’s it going, me?

Well, as I started this draft on Friday late afternoon, I had just put “Right now I want to go face down on a bowl of noodles” in a public chat at work instead of a direct message to Joel. So, there’s that. I decided then it was time to catch up here instead of continuing to work. Otherwise… hmmm, let’s see what’s been going down (on a bowl of noodles or not) in the last month or so.
- My colonoscopy went just fine, and I don’t have to do that again for many years. Yay!
- Last week in April, a gaming convention was in town, and I went to some of it and all the social events. Awesome for networking, fun times, but I definitely overconsumed in terms of calories. And beverages specifically. Fun times, but glad those aren’t often.
- May 10th we got up at 3am to hop a plane to Bonaire for a week! Finally! This was kind of a last-minute booking, when I wrote my last post, we only had tentative plans to go some time in the late spring. But work things came into focus, and we were able to duck out for the week between a major launch and before our Moulin Rouge tickets the Tuesday we returned. Diving was awesome, and while the vacation wasn’t really relaxing, it was enough to unspool me mentally. I’ve felt recharged this week at work and that’s really good news as I was getting kinda crispy.

So, yeah, been pretty busy around here, as always, and I finally have about a good few months where I don’t have a ton of social plans, travel plans, nothing crazy. So, it’s time to buckle down and make a nice, concerted effort on the tracking, weighing, etc etc and get some momentum going into late summer travel/race/chaos time.
#1 The Unwanted Kettlebell
I finally did the work to update all my weights in trendweight and looks like I’ve gained about 3 lbs since November. It is not unexpected or undeserved, but it’s truly frustrating to be a healthy, active, individual who tends to eat a lot of healthy food and only be able to maintain/lose when I am a very hungry caterpillar.
I’m also now understanding that 1200 + activity calories is probably too many to eat as a goal. Actually, it would be a fine goal, but it’s including my RMR, or my resting calories that I’m burning during that time too. Garmin estimates I burn about 1800 calories as a human doing human things (or 75 calories per hour, or 1.25 calories per minute) because I am more metabolically efficient than the average bear (grumble grumble). This is much less of a margin of error when I’m running for an hour (700 calories so like 10%) biking for an hour (500 calories, so like 15%), swimming for… haha, well, lets say 15 minutes (150 calories, so like 13%). When I am walking, that’s 300 calories per hour, so that’s a quarter of them. And no matter what, even the 10-15% adds up over time.
To lose weight, you need to create a deficit. An “easy” or at least gradual one is 500 calories per day. So, if I did nothing, I would need to eat 1300 calories a day. Miserable.

Good thing I always walk at least 1 mile a day, which is about 100 extra calories a day, minus the 25 calories I’m already accounting for (1.25 per minute x 20 minutes to walk the mile, so we are at 1375 as the baseline. Still miserable, but slightly less.
I do weights 3x a week for 30 mins. On average, I burn about 150 calories doing this each session. So, for the 90 minutes a week I do this, I burn 450 calories minus 112.5 just existing calories, so that’s an extra 337.5 calories for the week or 48 calories per day over the baseline. So, we are up to 1423 calories per day goal. Getting better.
The rest of my workout week (little lower than normal) this week will probably include one 45-minute bike (350 calories), one 10-minute swim (100 calories), and three 40-ish minute runs (let’s say 400 calories each on average, or 1200 total), so that’s 1650. Minus 219 for my existing calories during that time, that’s an extra 1431 per week or 204 per day.
So, this week, I should eat an average of 1627 calories per day to lose 1 lb. Since my workout schedule is pretty static right now (maybe 60 more minutes of cycling on a good week, which would add 500(workout) – 75(existing) = 425 more calories, or 60 more per day. So, as a guideline, I’m going to say I should be eating an average of 1600-1700 calories per day and ignoring what my calorie tracker says unless my activity deviates significantly and TBH, I don’t think it would deviate enough that I would NEED to eat more to survive, I just could.
What this probably looks more like in practice is 2-3 days at 2000, 2-3 days at 1500, and 1-2 days at like 1300. I am definitely consuming more than this now. Last week, best I did was 1600, and on average, 1956. My Fitness Pal thinks I overate by 500 calories. This new method says I’m over by about 2000, which considering how my weight is trending, seems to be more acccurate.
Also, this is a reminder to myself that if I can not just meet, but beat these goals some weeks, I’ll make faster progress. If 1600-1700 calories average is a 500-calorie deficit, then 1100-1200 calories is a 1000 calorie deficit to lose 2 lbs per week, which is the lowest you should safely go. I know myself, and I would go batshit insane on that calorie intake after like 3 days so that’s not happening. I love food. I enjoy whiskey (though I’m trying to enjoy it a little less to save on calories). 1600 is a good goal.
And FFS, if I can actually manage to lose 4 lbs per month, holy crap. That’d be the best progress I’ve had in a long time. I weighed in at 186.9 lbs today. I’ve got 18 weeks til Kerrville. This does include a 4th of July trip and a work convention trip, but if I can swing it, I could be back to my happy racing weight like I was in 2018-2019. Now, it just takes doing (the hard part, as always). But I feel mentally ready to go for it right now in a way I haven’t in a while.
#2 Sporty Stuff
I had honestly thought that I’d spend more time hiking this spring, but I have enjoyed the break from needing to spend major parts of my day on a trail. The process of working up to a 50k did some great things – I am super stable, I have great endurance, I feel stronger, and I suppose also that it helped me appreciate the relative simplicity in time commitment of triathlon training.

Since we last spoke, I have:
- Not missed a strength session. I did double one up the week before vacation, but it was a very long and productive arm workout with chest, shoulders, back, and biceps. And I didn’t do anything official during vacation but a week of hauling tanks and gear and myself with tanks and gear totally counts. The 25 lb dumbbells felt lighter after the week “off”, not heavier, heh.
- 11 runs. This is about 2 a week on average, not counting my vacation (which had other activity, see above). Starting a couple weeks ago, I’ve started to just do the workouts the Garmin has been telling me to do, and this has been awesome, I have some speedwork back in my life! It got cranky at me this week and lowered my VO2 max and put me on easier runs, but TBH, the weather got really hot, my sleep has kinda sucked, and it wasn’t completely wrong to do so.
- 13 bikes, so a little over 2x week. As it’s getting very warm, I have a feeling that I’m going to err on the side of hopping on my trainer in my nice, air-conditioned house, vs wanting to be outside.
- Swimming. Heh. Once. Yesterday. Hopefully I can get back into this soon. It’s just never going to be priority and it’s a pain in the arse to do (read: I cannot do it without leaving my home and traveling somewhere) but especially now that it’s summer, it feels SO GOOD.
- Walked 55 miles, which sounds like a lot but it’s about 1.4 miles on average per day. Def doing the bare minimum here right now, but that’s 55 miles (or 5500 calories) I would not have burned any other way!
- 17 Dives, 16h25m. Fun fact, I always thought I burned SO many more calories than I actually do diving. Now that I have the super fancy diving Garmin, I found out my heart rate stays super low (over all the dives, my average was 74 bpm) and searching the internet, the thermogenic effect in 82 degree water is also super low – so it probably just doubled my resting metabolic rate for a couple hours a day. Ah well. At least you burn a bit more by hauling tanks and gear and yourself with said tanks and gear around but not the “OMG IT’S LIKE RUNNING” I was led to believe.
My goal is to basically keep at it:
- 1 swim per week (like, really, it’s hot outside, this will feel very nice, it’s worth the annoyance)
- 3 runs per week (do what the garmin says)
- 3 bikes per week (tryyyyy to do what the garmin says, but prioritize running if it puts in too many “workouts”)
- 3x weights per week
- 1 mile (and probably pretty often just 1 mile) walk per day
#3 Adulting
Some things are in progress!
- Meet with a financial advisor on retirement (scheduled for June 2!)
- Clean out Joel’s office (murphy bed install is set for late June, then we can figure out the rest of the stuff in there)
- New goal for June – get all 4 bikes into the bike shop for maintenance and get my gatorskin tires off my race bike
I think that’s about it. I feel like there was some adulting I did in the last month or so, but I can’t remember it. So, I guess it doesn’t count.
#4 Hobbies

Book – I am at 99k (made some awesome progress this last month!) and I still have the final fight of the story and the resolution/epilogue to go. Definitely a longer one than the last two. I started this one in July last year. I’m going to do my damnedest to have my crappy first draft done by July. Of course, it’s a hobby, not a livelihood, but it’s good to have goals and I would love to read it like a book over 4th of July camping!
Photos – diving photos done from December done, I’ve sorted my winter trips and started editing… and then I broke my mouse dongle. So, I need to get another one of those so I can edit photos again!
Guitar – making the resolution this next month to get my acoustic tuned and play at least a few songs a day when I am WFH. I’m probably getting close to forgetting songs now and I worked so hard to learn them… I want to make sure they stay retained.
Vacations – we need to settle on our fall vacation. Was thinking some sort of sojourn to the northeast for fall leaf peeping, but the timing may not work out with other things going on this year during that specific time window (work trip, trip with family, race). I don’t want it to go so long that I get burnt out again and I also didn’t like doing the week after Thanksgiving trip because it felt like it kicked off 6 weeks of IDGAF holiday eating and the holiday season felt shorter somehow so definitely before then. So, maybe late Oct/early Nov for something?
#5 Work/Life Balance
Maybe it’s the vacation post-haze talking, or maybe it’s a project at work that had a lot of… anticipation and nerv-citedness around it finally finishing in a most amazing way, but I feel like this has been better lately. I’ve felt these pops of motivation this week that I haven’t in a while, so I’m super happy I seem to be emerging from the mental burnout fog I’ve been in on and off for way too long. I also know I have a 4-day weekend (Juneteenth, no plans) and a 4-night camping trip for 4th of July coming up as well. So, relaxing times are imminent, and I’m not even super stressed heading into them. Yay for me!
Going to go take my motivated self to go do some good over this Memorial Day weekend. 🙂