Just did a 4.7mile run with 4 big hills. I am lucky to live somewhere I can choose not to do hills if I want to but it sure does make it hard to do them when I can do long distances without them! I am trying to add a few more hills in and so far that has been on Sunday tempo runs. I avoid doing them when doing speed work and leave them out of my easy monday run. I have been too tired to do a saturday run and too scared to add them to my long runs so at this point it has just been sunday. I think maybe I will need to add them on my monday runs and eventually my long runs. I will also try to add back in a saturday run when I quit doing classes a few weeks before my next half. Anyway whenever I do run them I realise how hard they are! I did 4 fairly steep long hills today which felt good once I was done! I hate how slow I have to go up them and it makes my overall pace so much slower. I suppose that is why I need to work on them and I can only improve!!

In addition to that I pulled down all the photos and moved the furniture in and washed all the walls in the living room plus the light fixture and fan. I also dusted all the furniture and realised my couch is growing mold (everything grows mold here!) and I really need to steam clean it. It took around 2 hours and 20 minutes of fairly intense work in hot and humid conditions so I added it to my tracker. After my run I also did my PT homework. I also realise I'd short changed my PT workout on friday, which was okay since I was exhausted and didn't read it correctly so I'm going to try to do extra tomorrow.

Today's blog was also supposed to be about: something that is an obstacle to you in your weight loss journey (this can be a thing, an attitude, a person) and determine how to overcome this....
I'm not quite sure about this one. I quite liked someone else's blog on complacency because I know I have become complacent in my diet a little although not in my exercise. To be perfectly honest I am not sure what is causing my current obstacle which lately has been very slow weight loss since about September. I'm not even sure it is an obstacle as there have been loads of positive changes in my fitness level, strength, measurements and appearance. I have increased my exercise and that has not really changed my weight so I know it is not that. I have also made some diet modifications and that hasn't really done much. Currently I am making a more legitimate try at eating more calories to gauge the effect although I will say it feels a little wrong to eat this much.

So what obstacle is there? I suppose my mindset regarding food is a bit of an obstacle. I still feel a little like I am deprived by my healthier food choices. Not all the time as I love my healthy oatmeal/cocoa/peanut butter breakfast and most of my lunches and dinners are okay. I suppose I miss snacks and eating out as much. I think I have also accepted that this will be somewhat necessary to keep seeing progress. And I still do eat most things in moderation but sometimes I still feel like eating junk food with no thought of consequences. This probably leads to more binges and more meals out than are best for my weight loss.

There is also a part of me that feels like these feelings are normal and that upping my calorie intake has reduced these feelings in the past few days. So perhaps making sure my intake is high enough to deal with all the exercise I do is important physically as well as mentally. And that having an appropriate intake will help me avoid junk food. I think another way to approach this is to decide what kind of lifestyle I want out of this at the end. Do I want to be at a goal weight but feel deprived all the time or do I want slow weight loss to get me to a healthy weight that allows for wine on weekends or meals out without worrying about calorie ranges? I think I'll take the latter option and even when the scale annoys me I need to remind myself of that. Plus I want to fuel myself as an athlete and think of food in this way instead of worrying about good or bad food.

Anyway I'm clearly rambling. I think I might ice my L knee as it was again hurting on the back of the knee at the inside. Not much but I don't want it to get worse. I did a great foam roller stretch tonight as well so hopefully that helps. So glad I bought my foam roller!

Tomorrow will be the very hard xxtremefit class at 6am, 3 miles after work if I don't get afterhours calls and also my PT workout.