So I ran Squamish

It wasn’t the big one, it was sadder, shorter version for people that want the Squamish 50 feel without the near death experience. 23k was is roughly 14.2 miles with 2,000 feet of climbing. I got the medal, and the too small shirt because the the lady passing out the swag bags totally ignored me when I asked for men’s medium (being over six feet tall gives me shoulders wider than normal women) so she stuffed a medium WOMAN’S shirt and I sadly didn’t find this out until I pulled it out of the bag two days after the race.

 I have mixed emotions about it. I can’t say I felt very accomplished. It took me over 4 hours but I spent a good deal of time sitting along side the trail towards the end until I came down to sea level where I found a behind primitive bathroom in a park where I spent even more time finally able to assuage my stomach pains for a short enough time to get to the finish line.

 I was so slow that there were no cool pics of me running through the woods, just one embarrassing photo of me crossing the finish line. I looked bigger than I realized and the sad misery of why I was so damn slow sunk in like a knife.

 I had had a whole year to prepare for that and I crossed the finish line heavier than I had ever been in my life, even bigger than both of my pregnancies. I felt like crap, I looked like crap, I knew it was time to stop with the denial and just stop stuffing my face.

 I walked through Whistler Village for the rest of the week. Carefully tracking the calories I shoved in my face with the My Fitness Pal app as closely as I could, at least, and now three and a half months later I am down 20 pounds. I’ve already taken two minutes off my mile, and trust me even with those two minutes my time still isn’t anything impressive, and I am aiming for a total 40 pound loss by my 40th birthday which is two months from now. Okay, maybe it sounds a little ambitious but 40 before 40 had a good ring to it.

 I have tried losing weight a million different times, mostly when I didn’t need to lose now that I am looking back at it, because really the only time I have been legitimately overweight is from the three years I spent in Montana, gaining by the week, no matter how much exercising I was doing. It was a good lesson to learn that you can’t outwork crappy eating. It’s about calories, and the whole “I run because I like to eat” only really seems to apply to people that are running a hundred miles a week and even those runners eat way better than I ever did. Whole 30, keto, plant based, vegan. It really only works if you are eating in a calorie deficit. You can’t stuff your face just because it’s a magical type of food. I proved this to myself as we vacationed and ate crap food on the road and I STILL managed to lose weight because I added the calories up carefully and didn’t go over 1800. I ate buns with my burgers and drank a soda if I had the calories to spare and yep, still lost.

 So we’ll see where this goes, if I will get myself back in a condition that I want to cross a finish line again and actually order the picture, or maybe be faster enough for the photographer to find me in the woods.