The Hail Mary Body

Since it’s been more than a week since the marathon, I thought it was a good time to talk about how training for a marathon affected my body! After all, you’d think that running long distances would make you super sinewy and look like a runner! Maybe you’d even consider training for a marathon so that you could drop mad amounts of weight. Well, let’s take a closer look, shall we?

First, I did go into the marathon hoping to lose weight while training. My overall goal was really to develop a healthy relationship with food that would nourish me, but, let’s be honest, I also wanted to experience some healthy weight loss at the same time! When I started, I wasn’t sure how to eat for all the training, so I visited a nutritionist, and that helped so much. I was able to figure out how much to eat every day — and from which food groups — to be able to train without passing out. This was a great way to start training; once I had that figured out, I just stuck to her plan (which counted “exchanges” instead of calories) and didn’t have to worry about it!

I didn’t weigh myself much after the first month, because I didn’t really want to get depressed over a number, so I can’t tell you how much weight I lost in the first two months of training. I know that by Halloween (about halfway into training), I had dropped a jeans size and was feeling very lean. Even though I strayed from the eating plan a bit during three weeks of traveling, I did my best to just eat sensibly and stick to it 90 percent of the time, and my jeans continued to fit the entire time!

At the end of my trip, in mid-November, I hit Monster Month, and while my eating and running continued to go well, my strength training and Pilates goals really fell by the wayside. This was a bummer for me, but I was just so busy running, I did NOT feel like lifting any weights. Additionally, I really couldn’t work on my lower body because you can’t run 8 miles with sore legs from squats. I was disappointed about this, because while I felt awesome and I did feel strong, I would have felt stronger if I was doing regular strength training workouts.

When Monster Month began, the monster appetite followed! Suddenly, I was starving all the time, and really couldn’t help but eat. I also didn’t care. I still eat really healthy foods, had occasional splurges, and although I still used the original meal plan from my nutritionist, I didn’t freak out when I added a few extra carbs to my day. It was also the holidays, so there was good food to be eaten! I had heard it was hard to lose weight when training, and I figured out I was just reaching that point. I knew I had lost some weight, so I figured I’d just maintain until the marathon was over.

Luckily, in December I found the energy to add a fifth day of cross-training and to start working with weights again. I didn’t make a huge commitment to strength training, but I did stop making excuses after my shorter runs and started doing 15 minutes of arms twice a week, being sure to at least do push-ups. Thank GOD I did this, because within just a few weeks, I noticed that my upper body looked more toned and balanced.

Around this time, I noticed how much running and eating well had changed my body. It wasn’t a shocking weight loss or anything; my body was just shaped differently. My stomach was flatter and my back was stronger, leading to different (better) posture. My back and shoulders were toned and my arms were much leaner. And my lower body was very different! I noticed within the first month that my butt was getting a little bigger, but in the later months, when I had lost some weight, it was smaller but bigger, if that makes sense. My thighs were way more toned, especially my inner thighs. I noticed one day when I was stretching with shorts on that they looked almost as toned as when I was doing Pilates regularly, which was very exciting! Julia also noticed when she came to visit me…I had legs again! That was very exciting…I mean, it seems like DUH that your legs would get more toned, but it felt like it had happened in a “Free Gift With Purchase” sort of way.

Like I said last week, after far too much time eating carbs, I was ready to eat my veggies again and drop some of the water weight that carbs make you hold onto. And carbs are great, and I’m glad I eat them now, but I also don’t need to feel like I’m on an all-carb diet! I did the Fat Flush Plan for a few days, and I’m sort of doing Phase II now (Phase I ended abruptly with four hours of beer pong yesterday…oops).

My jeans had been feeling really baggy since the week before the marathon, so I took that as a sign that I had lost some weight. On Saturday morning it occurred to me that they were too baggy to really even look good anymore, so I was debating buying some new jeans. I happened to come across a pair of old jeans in my closet that hadn’t fit in about two years, jeans that I considered my “happy weight” size. I decided to try them on to see how close they were to fitting, because I couldn’t imagine that I was that size again. But I put them on and they fit! I was so surprised! I think because I haven’t been weighing myself or even obsessing about losing weight, I didn’t feel like I was losing any. I also don’t think I look dramatically different. But if these jeans fit, I have an idea of what weight that makes me, and that means I probably lost about 17 pounds when all is said and done! That’s 17 pounds of from not exercising for three months after getting injured, from going out too much to take my mind off boy drama, from last year’s bad winter, from a crazy trip home last May…so I am VERY happy to see those pounds go!

But 17 pounds in four months is not something you have to run a marathon to achieve! That’s a pretty reasonable rate of weight loss, and you could honestly lose that much (or more) in that amount of time from dieting and bare-minimum cardio alone. However, I have to say that I LOVE my body more than I would have if I had just dieted and done bare-minimum cardio! I respect it and appreciate it and I know I worked pretty hard to get it. I really watched my diet, ate really healthy foods, and hardly drank at all during the four months of training. I gave up time I could have been doing other things so that I could do my long runs and even my shorter runs required planning, effort, and a big chunk of hours.

It is possible to lose weight when training for a half-marathon or a marathon, but if you’re considering a big race for that reason, know that it’s not going to be easy. It’s not going to be, “Oh and then I ran a marathon and got sooo skinny and now boys love me!” No…just NO. If you just want to lose weight, this isn’t the way to go. Save yourself the weeks of training and, ya know, the 26.2 mile run! If you want to re-discover healthy foods, nourish yourself, eat really well, build some healthy and gorgeous muscles, and maybe lose a few lbs in the process, then I’d say go for it!

(Of course, I’d say go for it for about a million other reasons, but today we’re just talking outer beauty. The inner stuff is a way, way bigger reward than the 17 pounds. Seriously.)

Tagged as: Diet, marathon training, outer beauty, running, weight loss