Half Way There

Half way through my February Challenge over on Facebook and my team is doing fabulously. We're in 1st place out of nine teams, but the 2nd place team is hot on our trail! We've been posting videos of ourselves working out, muscle shots, after-workout-sweaty pics and motivational sayings galore. It's really fun to see what everyone else is up to in their own little corner of the country. Some people are doing a Beach Body program, but most are doing their own thing, running, walking and lifting their way towards reaching their goals.

Here's a sweaty shot of me in the gym locker room.  

After working out diligently and keeping fairly good track of my calorie consumption over at My Fitness Pal, I thought I'd see some good results when weighing in at the two week mark. To say I was disappointed would be an understatement.

I'm actually up .4 pounds since my beginning challenge weigh in, and yes, I'm up many pounds from my lowest weight about a year ago. Of course I didn't measure myself at the beginning of the month, so even though I feel better I don't have any tangible evidence saying that all of this work is actually doing something. Now I know .4 pounds is really nothing and the scale is an evil bitch, and all of this cardio is fantastic for my heart and lungs, my blood pressure is normal, I'm raising my good cholesterol and lowering the bad, I'm more fit than I have ever been at any other point in my life, but is it too much to ask that the MoFo scale go down??!!?? Grrrrr...

The only factors that I think may have come in to play is that I am eating back too many of my exercise calories and I have not been sleeping all that well. I could probably stand to eat less. Sleeping more eludes me. I've been getting up a lot to visit the bathroom. I drink a lot because I'm supposed to and then it haunts me at night. Last night I woke up about every 2 hours. At 2:30 I couldn't go back to sleep, so I started to read. This is what I'm in the middle of:

Grete Waitz was a Norwegian dynamo. I can't imagine winning the NYC Marathon ONCE let alone NINE times! (Anyone else hear Mr. Rooney from 'Ferris Bueller'?) What an extraordinary accomplishment. And I am so sad to say that when I Googled her name for this picture I discovered that she passed away from cancer at the age of 57 in 2011. When and if I run my first marathon I will be thinking of Grete. I'll be running for her and Fred Lebow, the founder of the NYC Marathon, my mother-in-law Gloria and my mom and my girlfriends and for everyone who has battled cancer in their lives. My favorite mantra is "Do it for those who can't." So I'll focus on what I CAN do and not what the scale tells me, because .4 pounds is not a problem in the grand scheme of things.