One of the most important aspects of my life has been developing self care practices, in particular physical training and healthy nutrition. I'm going to share the progress I've made and where my interests have grown over the years, along with some of the different things that have helped me.
This was me in 2017 when I was beginning to be interested in learning how to develop muscle and start training my body. At a young age I had asthma and struggled with being able to keep up with other kids when running at school. I decided to train for my first 5k in 2017. This was a picture of me with my father on race day.
Later that year I decided to run the Cap 10k (one of the larger races in Austin and a really fun one!). If you are looking to get into running and want to try an approachable race this is the one I would recommend, all the people give you so much energy racing together.
At the end of the year I decided to run the Austin Turkey Trot with a buddy of mine. I wore a fun fake afro during the race. Dressing in a costume for race day can make both your own race and the race for others silly and magical, would highly recommend! In 2017 I completed my first half marathon in the 3M race, for those looking to run a half marathon, this is the one to try. It is downhill from The Domain to Downtown.
In 2018 I also started learning more about weight lifting. I had lifted weights in the past but decided to start learning the foundational movements of bench press, dead lift and squat outlined from the Starting Strength barbell program. For those interested in getting into weight lifting and don't have much experience, this is the perfect place to start in order to learn best practices.
After a few years of lifting I had gained more muscle and understanding of how to push my body. One of the best places on the internet to learn how to develop physically has been Jeff Cavalier's channel Athlean X. I cannot stress how amazing this guy is. He breaks down everything you could possibly want to know about training and nutrition with science and years of experience. When I go into the gym I know exactly how to approach the equipment and a great deal of my knowledge has come from Jeff.
In 2021 I decided to start training for the big kahuna, my first marathon! I didn't know it at the time but the Austin Marathon is one of the hardest courses to run as the elevation gain and loss is stagerring. I knew I needed help to train for this so I joined Rogue Running and had a group of runners to run with and a coach for learning how to further tune the engine of the body. Chris McClung and all the amazing people at Rogue are so wonderful, check them out if you want help training for a race.
When you start running for over 1.5-2 hours there are considerations that you need to take for hydration, nutrition, pacing, motivation, etc...
On race day in February of 2022 I was so excited for the race (typically I don't sleep much or at all before race day) that I had the bright idea of jogging about 3+ miles from East Austin to the starting line Downtown. This way I wouldn't need to take a ride share and I could let my girlfriend sleep in. I think I was listening to too much David Goggins as I could feel those extra miles I didn't account for in training at the very end. Anything past the standard 26.2 marathon is considered an ultramarathon, so technically that year I did an ultramarathon in the form of 30 miles, it was also the 30th year of the Austin Marathon which was a fun conicidence.
It took me over 5 hours to complete the marathon. It is likely that I could have completed the race in a shorter time had I not added those extra jogging miles at the beginning. Training for the Marathon also required a lot of training on asphalt, running through Austin's hill and lots of weekends of 4+ hour training runs with focused recovery afterwards. I enjoyed all that I learned from this but decided that running town lake on the weekend (the full loop being 10 miles) on the gravel is sufficient for me to get my running fix. I may decide to try Spartan races or trail races in the future as a fun challenge.
In 2023 I decided to take up more extensive training in the gym with weights along with a more regular yoga practice and this has been where I've been ever since. I've been experiementing with maintaining different levels of body fat. Initially between 15 and 11 percent, now more recently between 7 and 10 percent. I've learned that below 10% body fat is where the requirements for nutrition really kick in. You can't out train a poor eating plan.
One of the many great things I learned from Jeff is that I use the word nutrition instead of diet as diet implies a short term implementation and what I'm after is long term results that stick.