July 23, 2010. Ideal racing weight. Now that's a touchy subject! I wasn't exactly athletic as a kid. My parents will be the first ones to admit, I was raised by musicians, not athletes. My parents met and fell in love in the WVU marching band, and my dad went on to a long career as a high school marching band director while my mom played in an orchestra. I spent all my summers at band camp instead of sports camp. When the American Pie movies came out, I never heard the end of the "This one time, at band camp..." jokes from my husband. In fact, I used to start my childhood stories with that statement, but I stopped after that movie came out. I spent the majority of my childhood in piano lessons instead of on sports teams. Sure, I could crank out some Bach at a very early age, but that's not exactly cool when you are standing in 7th grade P.E., waiting to be chosen for the dodgeball team.
Running did not come naturally to me either. Sure, I loved to run, but only to the pantry to make sure I grabbed the Keebler cookies before my older brother could eat them all. In 8th grade, I attempted to join the track team, but I dropped out after the first track meet, after being humiliated in the 800 and coming in dead last while gasping for air. Later, I tried my hand at track in high school, but as I mentioned in an earlier blog, I hold the high school record for lowest high jump...3' 11". My best track event: quitting the track team. Pathetic.
Years later, I'm a better athlete and runner, but I still don't always have a love affair with my bathroom scale. Remember that scene from the movie Office Space, when Michael Bolton and his IT buddies take the copy machine into the middle of the deserted field and wail on it with a baseball bat to the tune of gangsta rap? That's pretty much my fantasy of what I'd like to do to my scale each morning. There are only three times in my life when I've lost weight easily: 1. during the stomach flu, 2. the day I gave birth, and 3. in my dreams.
Even so, my mind is beginning to wander onto my upcoming marathons and is contemplating if dropping a few pounds might make the 26.2 miles go a little easier. I march downstairs to my home gym and grab a 10 lb. weight. Man, that feels heavy. Do I really want to carry that for 26.2 miles if I don't have to? No way. Especially since I'll have to lug all that heavy water with me during the race. Thus begins my journey into researching an ideal racing weight.
According to my research, the ideal racing weight is vaguely defined as the lowest body fat percentage you can maintain without it negatively impacting your racing performace. Seems that the smaller you get, the faster you get. There is, apparently, no downward limit on what you should weigh, so long as you don't collapse at the starting line. Ethiopians, rejoice! Me, I'm somewhere between Ethiopia and Oprah, so there's going to need to be a little compromise for my weight goal. Can I lose 10 pounds before my first marathon? That sounds reasonable. My scale had better cooperate with me on this, because I've got a baseball bat in the garage, and I'm not afraid to use it! Look for future updates on my progress, unless I gain weight, at which point I will ignore the fact that I ever brought this topic up on my blog.
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