Do You Know What Fit Looks Like? A short follow up.

About a year ago I wrote a little piece inspired by the events that happened at last year Wimbledon. The female champion had been heavily criticized for having larger physique. It is entailed "Do you know what fit looks like?" and it is the most popular post I have ever published. I feel it is very important that society has a healthy view of exercise and fitness as well as realistic expectations of the results. Fitness is about lifestyle, not the number on the scale or the number on the clothing size.

I am tired of seeing articles that discuss how running and spinning make you fat. I refuse to provide links to that trash, but they can be easily found. This perpetuates the notion that exercise is only about outward appearance. As I have said before fitness usually has some positive effects on appearance, but to truly master a discipline this really needs to be viewed as a pleasant side effect. In myself, I have found that the harder I train as a cyclist, that my legs get firmer, but also bigger. However, the number that count, the distance I can travel and the speed I can cycle continue to go up.

I have a confession. Training for this duathlon was the first time I really contemplated the notion of race weight. I seriously thought about working to lose 10 pounds to be a more "competitive weight".  (I am already a healthy weight for my height.) In the end, I abandoned the idea. Whatever weight I would or would not lose in training would be enough. After all, I do physics for a living, not racing. My speed in the race would only matter to me and my job gives me enough stress to worry about the scale too. So I ate healthy and trained hard.

In my last piece I gave my numbers and challenged other athletes to do the same. I will give you my current numbers. At the beginning of my training I weighed around 136-138 pounds. I was a US size 4 and somewhere between a UK 10 and a UK 8. I had taken a six month running hiatus due to injury and I cycled mostly for transportation. My training involved exercising 5-6 days a week with usually two long (2.5+ hour) workouts a week. And guess what? On the day of the Duathlon I weighed around 136 pounds, however my fitness had substantially increased and I looked much more muscular. Also, I had gone down a clothing size, but I had not really lost any weight. This is fine since the numbers that mattered were just perfect. On September 14, these numbers where 20/77/10 and 6:55:55. I weigh more now than when I ran the marathon in 2010 and my average running pace is around 1:30 faster on long runs and 2 minutes faster on short runs. Also my average cycling pace about 2 mph faster than it was two summers ago. These are the numbers that are far more important to me.

So what are your numbers? The ones that really matter. Let us be a part of revolutionizing the ideas of what being fit looks like.