Melbourne 2012 Runs

I've done a couple of runs in the last month or so. The first was the 21km Melbourne half marathon, part of the Melbourne running festival. The second was the 14km city-to-sea, which is the Melbourne version of the more famous city-to-surf run in Sydney. The half marathon started outside the MCG, headed South for a loop around Albert Park, and returned North again to finish inside the MCG. The city-to-sea started just South of Flinders Street station, taking a similar route, but headed West to the coast at St Kilda following the Albert Park loop. Both runs were fairly flat with no hills to speak of, and unusually for Melbourne, the weather was perfect.

Both days started with a taxi ride to the city, due to the complete lack of public transport early on a Sunday. I didn't train as well I should've, but went out fairly hard in the half marathon, basically just holding out until the end. I was still way off two hours, finishing in 2:05:55. I took the city-to-sea a bit easier, finishing the 14km run in 1:22:55. Unfortunately I haven't got around to doing much running since then, but I hope to get back to it following my not so well deserved vacation in Vietnam.

A Weighty Issue

So I've registered for the Melbourne half marathon, more as an incentive to get back into running than for anything else. I'm pretty slow but have run three marathons (Thailand Temple Run, Bangkok, Edinburgh) and a few half marathons (Sydney, Melbourne, Singapore), though that was some time ago. I've got a couple of months to train so we'll have to see how it goes.

I'm fairly heavy now, at 82kg, and want to lose about 8kg for the run. Losing weight is a simple matter of mathematics. If you USE more calories (a unit of energy) than you CONSUME, you will lose weight, and you can even calculate how much.

USE: Even if you do absolutely nothing all day, you will use about 1 kcal per hour per kilogram of your weight. For me that's about 80 kcal per hour, or about 2000 kcal per day. For running or cycling I use an additional 700 kcal per hour, and for walking it is about 300 kcal. So I'll use about 2000-3500 kcal, depending on my level of activity, which I hope to keep at 3000 or more.

CONSUME: Calories are consumed either through fats (9 kcal per gram), carbohydrate (4 kcal per gram) or protein (4 kcal per gram). There are lots of websites that allow you to calculate your calorie intake. Cereal for breakfast, a nice focaccia for lunch and spag bol in the evening, with no snacking and sticking mainly to drinking water and tea, and I'm at a minimum of about 1650.

Which gives me 3000 - 1650 = 1350 as my biggest deficit. As there are 9 calories in 1 gram of fat, I should be losing 0.15kg a day, which is about 1kg a week, or 8kg in eight weeks. If I can keep it up, that is.