so far. Did some checking. I’ve run through a December ONCE in the last dozen years: 2019. So here’s what’s going on. Starting on Easter I started a meal replacement drink: Huel. Usually two a day (800 calories.) Charted my meals for a month and figured out where the problems kinda were. And dropped 20 – 25 pounds by Labor Day. Running was going well. I changed up my approach. More days off. More HIIT. Less LSD. And it seems to be working. I was under 210 on the first day off fall. I’ve hit it a few times since then but have cut out a few things (alcohol and snacks) to keep myself under. Figure IF I can stay under 210 until spring I won’t have to spend a couple months trimming down – AGAIN.

Am relying on Fast After 50 by Joe Friel. There’s a CRAP ton of information but pared down it seems t be a pretty good training schedule especially when I pair it as needed with the stuff over at Brian Mac which I’ve used for decades. Combine that with Strength Training for Life After 40 and I’m pretty happy. Final piece f the puzzle was moving my dads treadmill into MY garage. It’s gotten a lot of use since Halloween and will for the next 2-3 months. Keeping my Cooper test results right in the same range. No improvement but holding steady is a GOOD thing.

BP is the same. Resting pulse still around 50. Weight < 210. Body fat around 20. Not worried about sprint times or time trials. We’ll pick those back up in February or March.

The next 90 days is for maintenance.

in August for about two years so we’ll use those numbers to get us started.

I got up to 230# on Easter. And then took steps. Diet. Calorie charting. Exercising. And I reread all of those old running posts. And FINALLY learned a few things.

1. A 45 year old can train like a 30 year old but a 60 year old can NOT train like a 45 year old. More rest. Like – a LOT more. Which I’d always treated as anathema. And more weight work.
2. So I turned to three new tools. First comes The Barbell Perscription – weightlifting after 40. Second is Fast After 50. And third is chatGPT, including its Fitness, Workout and Diet coach. QUITE helpful.

So I’ve taken all these lessons and overlayed them onto the Brianmac.co.uk workouts I’d BEEN using for the last two decades or so. Throw in Strava.com to replace the utility that Fitbit has degraded, and keep the fitbit for the other stuff. Pretty sure you’re talking a fitness dynamo.

Numbers. August ’22 I was 213. Currently 209. Body fat was 24 is now barely 20. VO2 max was in the 24 range. Currently headed toward 40. NONE of my splits are where they were but my hip is healthy and I’m looking to fix that. 100m within 1 second, 200 within 4, 400m within 7. Mile within about 15. GOTTA start incorporating the speed work soon. I’m comfortable with my progress so far. Here’s Augusts plan: lifting 1-2 days per cycle (a cycle being 6-9 days.) LSD three days a week, upping my distance steadily. Wanna get up to at least 2 soon. Currently 1.6. Astrands at least once per cycle. And two rest days per cycle based on work load.

And hopefully when I’m back in September I’ll be hitting 17’s, 36’s, and 1:24’s. VO2 number currently 38.3. Wanna get up around 39.2 And then move to the Early Base 1 portion of the plan. That’s focus on lifting, with a medium focus on aerobic threshold and low focus on aerobic capacity. Harder lifting. Less LSD, more Astrands. That’ll be September.

Haven’t run since October. Weight got up to 230. Resting pulse rate got up to 59. BP was “walking stroke.” Then at Easter I went on “the diet.” Started charting every calorie in and increasing my calories out – mainly by walking. Thirty minutes of activity per day via Fitbit. And (product placement) I started taking Olly gummies to “improve metabolism.” And added a meal substitute (Huel) to get away from the empty calories.

First month? Lost 8 pounds. Got back on my BP meds and I’m now down to “keep paying attention or I’ll bit your ass” and my RPR was down to 55-56. Ran out of Olly gummies. And the progress stopped for about two weeks. Purchased more Olly’s: weight dropped under the magic 220 and I’m now running again.

One mile yesterday. Under 11 minutes. One minute run, one minute walk. Today I’ll make it 2:1. I’ll increase that time spread gradually this week. After about 5-7 days like this and I’ll start tinkering with the miles instead of the time on task. The MIRACLE of smart phone apps is in its small increments. I used to increase my distances a mile at a time. Does NOT work as you age. But bumping it 1/10th is easy with my fitbit. The “overuse” formula I used last year has made me happy. I’m a systems guy and it provides a good system. Keeps me (usually) from over doing it, allows occasional steps back, and provides nice gradual trackable progress.

I’ll likely be back end of June with a spring/summer update.

because there was no autumn running. October was windy and kinda wet so my mileage was spotty. Then in November I was supposed to begin directing a show. That failed effort took the first two weeks of THAT month. And by the time that was over it was mid-November. I’d lost whatever edge I’d had. So I gave up and enjoyed food season (from Halloween through Thanksgiving, Christmas, NYE/NYD, bowls, and playoffs, culminating in the Super Bowl and Valentines Day. 

But here in ’24 I’ve cranked it up again. Weight maxxed out at 225. Heart rate up to 55. But I’m hitting the weights again. Mark Rippetow’s Starting Strength is the new template. Really did NOT like last year’s plan. Forty to fifty reps per exercise was just too many. Doesn’t fit my temperament. Targeting a daily regimen based on that math thing I started using last year. Right now it’s just walking in the neighborhood when weather permits or on the treadmill when it doesn’t, but it’s something. And when the weight goes under 220 (next week some time perhaps?) I’ll start running again. That should accelerate weight loss for a few weeks and get me down under 215 maybe by the end of the month. So by spring I’ll be ready to extend and push and stuff. 

Growing old is NOT for sissies.

After last spring’s <ahem> missteps I got back at it and this summer’s running has been pretty good. Mentally I was hungry to get started AND the ease of this summer (test run for retirement) rewired my head a bit. Less reluctance to take a day or two … or three off as needed.

I didn’t do a winter or spring update because, well, winter is rarely good and this past spring was a train wreck. But here’s an update as of early August. First the bio-metrics. Weight down to 215. Down from spring, up from last year but well within reason. Body fat in the 20-21 range. Good but not great. A hot August/September could take me below 20. BMI just under 27. Was in the low to mid 26s last year, so… fair. VO2 in the mid 30’s. Not bad but not where it needs to be. Need to take a full minute off my 1.5. It can happen. Distance work to continue. Not ready for speed yet. But I DID do some time-trial work this weekend. Hips are not a problem this season. Pretty much everything from 600m down is back where it was last June or July. LAST August was my fastest month is quite a while. Don’t think I’ll be able to duplicate it but hopefully by autumn I’ll be there again. Not many races this season in C-bus and I’m not fast enough to go much more than a couple hours away. Dayton. The Cincy burbs. Wheeling. Mansfield. Gotta start keeping my eye on NEXT season’s meet schedule!

Summer was awesome. HOT. But VERY productive. Right up until rehearsal got heavy. And I took over a week off starting tech Sunday.

By the numbers: weight under 210, body fat under 20, BMI dropped from 26.6 to 26.0. VO2 max is hovering just under 40. Fastest 3-mile since 2015 and fastest TWO-mile since 2013! Finally got a legit 100m down to 18.1. Still slow but … the last week off has healed my hip. Did a few lunges last night and it felt fine. We’ll see it comes back under pressure.

Show opened last Friday. Been wet and windy ever since but it looks like I’ll be able to hit the road again today. Road work Wednesday through Friday then start “training” again 10/1 and see how it goes. Last time around the first two weeks went well before the VO2 max limits added up. If I haven’t lost TOO much October will go well.

It was a good month with some bad stuff sprinkled in

First the good stuff – a few numbers.

Weight under 213. That’s down a dozen from 1/1.

Body fat under 24. Was 30!

Which means I WAS lugging around 67.5 pounds of fat with 158 of muscle, bone and water, whereas NOW I’m at about 51 pounds of fat with about four POUNDS more muscle. BMI has dropped from 28.1 to 26.6

VO2 max is around 35 which is pretty good for a guy my age. But not good enough. I need to get it up around 40. Why? How do I know? Workouts. THAT’s how I know. My 100m is lagging at 18.2 due mainly to this nagging back/hip thing. 400m at 1:30 is ok at this point. Once I get up to about 800m to my 8:11 miles it starts to lag.

Quick biology stuff. The 400m sprinter derives 14% of its fuel from the anaerobic alactic (phosphagen) energy system, 48% from the anaerobic lactic (glycolytic) energy system and 38% from the aerobic system. Each of these systems can be further broken down into power and capacity. This early training phase focuses on anaerobic lactic capacity and power, along with aerobic capacity (distance work.) Distance work (1-3 miles) is going ok. Anaerobic lactic power (<400m) has been going fine. But the OTHER – the repeats in the 500-900m range – has SUCKED. Pace of the repeats has been solid, but I can’t do ENOUGH of them. If the workout calls for 4-6 I’m lucky to get 3.

So how do I fix this? I think I hone in on the Cooper test result. Instead of targeting 35-37 I need to get it over 40. That means shaving about a minute off my 2000m. So I’ll keep the weight work where it is. I’ll dump the “speed work” for the time being. I’ll continue the distance work with Astrands on the weekend. And re-evaluate the Cooper test as the distance times come down.

Additionally I’ve noticed that recovery times “haven’t been long enough.” Most of the plans I follow call for 1 or 2 minute recovery between efforts. Scientifically I know I need my heart rate down under triple digits between reps. It hasn’t been getting there. So along with the improved recovery heart rate I’m also going to start goosing those durations up a bit due to my age – adding up to 50% to the recommended times, until the improvement shows up, when I can “reduce the goose.”

And finally I’ve started using acute chronic workload monitoring to evaluate my work. Currently basing it on distance but will modify to include heart rate soon. This enables me to see when I’m not working hard enough AND when I’m over-doing it. Makes scheduling those days off a lot more “math” and a lot less “feel.”

Spring has once again turned to summer and I’m still trying to figure out how to run. It’s been a good three months for the most part. Started lifting and it’s going well. Workout schedule right now is kinda like this: Distance most days. Two to two and a half miles. If the weather is prohibitive I hit the gym and lift. And on the weekend I try to go to the track one day. Time trials the first w/e of the month, Astrands the rest of the time.

I shoulda started watching all of my numbers sooner. My weight WAS bouncing from 217 to 221 but lately it’s been in the 216-218 range. Happy with that. And recently noticed my body fat % under 25 after swinging between 28 and 30 last winter. Twenty-five is kinda the magic number for guys over 60. My Cooper Test’s are in the mid 35’s. Good but not good enough. Need to get them into the 36 range, which means taking 10 seconds off my 2k and 21 off my 1.5 mile.

This is where Acute:Chronic Workload Ratio comes in. Stumbled across it a few months back and been charting it ever since. Roughly it looks at my training distance over the past week and compares it to the past month. If the ratio is under .9 I’m not working hard enough. If it’s over 1.5 I’m heading for an injury. So I take my track workouts as they come and convert my lifting into calories burned and then into distance run and use the whole damned spreadsheet to determine how far each daily workout is.

I edged past 1.5 before last w/e’s trip to Knoxville so injury was avoided. This procedure is keeping me mentally comfortable while providing a nice guideline. I can see 2 1/2 Sunday or Monday and 3 miles by July 4th. Speed work/race prep by August?

When I last mentioned this I was about to undertake “speed training” again. And I did. Was worried about the first workout (5×400) but made it through. Struggled a bit on the last repeat but accomplished the designated number at the designated distance at the designated pace. A day of road work was nice. Next rack day was to be 8-12×100 in 20-22. First four were around 17. Realized that was too fast so I eased up for the next three just under 22. And then it happened. The “last” one was gonna be my burner – wanted to “top end” it. But about five steps in felt that twinge in a quad. Familiar. So I pulled up immediately.

Perhaps it was too much too soon. Opted get back into road work for a month. About ten days later felt a twinge in my left calf. A new one. Quarter mile in to a 2 1/2 mile road run. So I walked back and realized the rest of October would be walking. Which it was.

We’re now into November. Finally started running again. At the beginning. Calf still a LITTLE sore but I think I can work through it. And maybe by 2022 I’ll be able to try another foray into speed work. On the BRIGHT side …. only put on 3# while walking and and managed to shed it pretty quickly. Was under 215 Sunday morning. 210 for Remy’s wedding is withing sight!

This summer’s running was NOT good. I’d hit a ceiling and wasn’t feeling good, mentally OR physically. Talked to a couple people and the solution came from an unlikely (?) source. Kim suggested that instead of kicking my mileage up so fast and running every other day I decrease the increment of increase but run more often. After a month of tinkering with THAT idea I’ve finally reduced it to a mechanic and made a leap in progress.

Here’s the deal. I resorted to my Fit-bit (duh!) I come home from school and open the dashboard. I’m told my daily seven day average. I increase THAT number by 10% (a reasonable weekly step up), subtract my distance covered that day and voila – there’s my training distance for that day (round up to next highest ¼.) Running almost daily. Legs feeling tired but not aching. Mentally sharp. The last three days I’ve run more than any given week in YEARS! Without pushing I breezed to my best 2 miles in over 17 months. Best mile in a year. Superior Cooper test results. Finally ready to start speed work again.

Or not. Using the guidelines for speed work I’ve used for decades of “successful” racing my first w/o SHOULD be 5-7 400m under 1:45, 2′ rest between. I can do ONE quarter under 1:45. Maybe two. But I’m not convinced I can do four or five. I’ll TRY it of course. Maybe today. Maybe tomorrow. But I’m not optimistic. And that’s not good. That means that if I’m struggling part way through the third, I’ll hang it up. Call it off. Which makes sense. But where do I go next? Back to LSD? Longer intervals to get my aerobic capacity up? More three-milers? And how much more? A week? A month?? Technically I need to shave 8 more seconds from my 2-mile time so if the 400’s bomb I’ll refocus on the 2-mile time and hit the October workouts again when I hit it.