Weight

It's a tough topic and it's been on my mind.
Perhaps I'm sensitive to the whole thing because, alas, I was a porkster as a teenager. I was still cute, don't get me wrong, but I was a porkster. I had a body that was soft and fleshy. I only dared to wear a one piece. I had big boobs.
Don't believe me?  Photographic evidence. Spring of 1989. 18 years old.
I'm the one on the end with the white t-shirt.
And you thought I was exaggerating... tsk tsk.

This picture was taken at Range Pond in Maine with a few of my freshman year college buddies.

Nineteen years and three kids later I returned to Range Pond for the Wild Bear Triathlon. I probably would've shit myself if you had told me then that I would end up returning to Range Pond at age 37 to do a triathlon--and that I would go on to complete an Ironman two years later. Actually, I'm quite sure I didn't even know what an Ironman was at that point.

Around the time that picture was taken I had just taken up running for the first time. Courtney (Smith North shirt, above) and I would leave our dorm at midnight so we would not be seen, and run on the track. I could only run one lap when we began. By the end of the semester I could run a mile.

Some people describe their first running experience as cathartic. They loved it. They knew they would always run.
I hated it. I only ran at night so people would not see how pathetic and slow I was, and how often I needed to stop to catch my breath.  But I despised myself and my body even more, and I really didn't want to give up beer and pizza. I had no choice but to run.
 
Here I am finishing at Range Pond in 2007.

After many, many years I began to run because I loved to run.   However, worrying about my weight never left me. Honestly, what women isn't haunted by weight worry?  For example, I just stole a piece of my son's 6th birthday cake, made with, according to my mother-in-law, six sticks of real butter. I had a piece last night too. With chocolate ice cream. And that's not the only indulgence I've partaken of this week, trust me. To boot, I'm on forced rest until November.  By November I fear I will be an elephant.

 (above: Mary at IM CDA 2010.)

Telling myself to let it go--that soon I will be training again and watching what I put in my mouth-- doesn't seem to help. I call it Fear of  Elephant-Ness Syndrome or F.O.E.S.

F.O.E.S. is a big deal to nearly all women, and in our sport, weight takes on even more weight. It's not only tied to beauty standards forced on us by culture, it's tied to performance. Men suffer the same weight preoccupation as women when they involve themselves in multisport because weight is so tied to performance. So I feel for you dudes, too.

This isn't a post on how to deal with F.O.E.S., though. We all have our methods, and I'm not here to lecture on which methods are healthy.  My real reason for writing on weight is this: It's hard to determine what one's weight should ideally be.

Losing weight is hard to do, but it's so attractive to we running/tri obsessed people. I've read that for every pound you shed you take 2 seconds per mile off your running pace. That means that for a marathon you'd run five minutes faster if you did nothing other than to shed just five little pounds. How awesome is that? Just lose the weight and the P.R. is in the bag!  EXCEPT it isn't in the bag because there is, of course, a point of diminishing returns. You risk losing muscle tissue if  you lose weight when already slim which will make you slower, not faster. Further down the road from diminishing returns is the development of anorexia--or more likely for we athletes--anorexia athletica.... (It sounds so pretty, doesn't it? --like a smiling skeleton with a poppy in her hair.) I know anorexia is most closely associated with teenage girls, but we adult athletes are also at risk because there is so much emphasis on body composition in our sport.

Some would argue it's a simple formula to know how much one should weigh. I don't know the formula, but I'm quite sure there is one. The formula used when I was growing up in the 80's was this (for women): For every inch above 5 ft., add 5 lbs onto 100.  I am 5'2.5", so I should weigh, optimally, 112.5 lbs. That's not the formula anymore, though. The problem was, among other things, that assigning a number didn't account for how much fat or muscle a person carried. A person can have a ton of body fat but only weight 112.5 pounds at 5'2.5", but that person is not healthier than someone who weighs more but has less body fat. Now we determine appropriate weight using the BMI scale, but that thing is way too general to be helpful, and also doesn't account for % of body fat.  Honestly, I don't know how one determines what is right. Also, it seems that "right" in the real world and "right" for an endurance athlete are quite different things.

Who the hell knows.

In the face of having no good way to determine what my "right" weight is on paper, I have been forced to experiment in real life. What follows is my extremely scientific (haha) way to determine whether I'm track with my weight. Maybe it will help you do the same. You never know.

Here it is:

Mary's Top Six Ways of Achieving and Maintaining Optimal Weight:

1. Am I hungry?  Okay. That sounds stupid, but it is my number one way of determining whether I'm on track or not.  I believe I should not be hungry. Ever. This is the benefit of not living in a third-world country. There is a difference between craving and hunger. I crave Devil Dogs, but I don't always eat them. Hunger is different than craving. It is signified by a rumbling tummy, by an irritable mood, and by light-headedness. If I am hungry, I am not on track.
2. Am I craving? I'm also not on track if I'm craving. If I'm craving, I'm denying.  If I'm denying myself, I'm not on track. If I want a nice dark beer, I drink it. If my mother-in-law makes a six-stick butter chocolate cake, I have a slice. If I am craving an ice cream sundae, I have a sundae making party with my kids. What I've found is that by not limiting myself, I don't crave. I also don't experience guilt. I also don't feel the need to binge during the "off" season. I also can say no to a sweet or juicy burger or a drink, because I know if I really want it, I can always have it tomorrow.
   
3. Do people tell me I look thin?  Here is a clue: If people notice you are skinny, and they say, often in alarm, Wow! You look really thin! That's a very, very bad sign. When you are the right weight you look healthy. People see you and say, Wow! You look so fit! You look really strong. God, I wish I had those arms... You are seriously buff. If you are unsure, you can always ask a member of the opposite sex that you trust and who you are not sleeping with. Yes, you look good. Not too thin--just strong. or Actually, you are looking kind of skeletal. Your face is a little gaunt. and so on.
4. How am I training and racing? This is a neat experiment. Record your weight prior to each workout and race. At the end of the season, figure out at what weight you seemed to have the most success. This is totally unscientific, b/c there are like a billion factors that determine how well you do in a workout or race. Still, it's an interesting little tidbit of data. Usually you will find there is a sweet spot--a range of two-four pounds at which you train and race best.
   
5. Am I menstruating? Okay. It doesn't help to ask yourself that if you're a guy. But if you're a chick, and you're under 48, and you're not getting your period regularly (especially if you have gotten in regularly in the past) that's a wicked bad sign.
6. Always add to your diet, never subtract:  This goes right along with the no restricting/craving rule. I never take something away. I just add. For example, when I feel like I'm not eating well, I make sure I am eating five fruits and seven servings of veggies a day. That's wicked hard. Have you ever genuinely tried to do that? When you do, you find that the fruit and veggies suck up a lot of your hunger. You are absolutely allowed to have a burger and fries if you want it, but usually you feel too gassy and full from the green stuff and you don't want to bother.
   

And now, I'm off to making ghost cookies with Lara.