A Layover in the Journey

After about 400 days away, I find myself coming back to my blog a little sheepish but back none the less.

I would love to have some fabulous story about why the long absence - but the truth is that I just walked away from the whole fitness lifestyle. It doesn't make sense when I think about what I have seen happen in the training for the 2 half marathons. I guess that we all do things for reasons that even we can't understand looking back.

I guess that when I think about it - the reason that I have returned comes down to family health. Over the last several months, we have been on journey as an extended family that we didn't think we would be on. Without going into details, I feel that I have been given a glimpse into a possible future of mine if changes are not made. So drastic changes are being made. That's why I am back here.

I don't think that I will be attempting either the half or full marathon this year. I don't believe that my body is ready for that. I will be returning to walking at lunch and will be returning to strength training over the next few weeks. My diet is also undergoing some changes. Last fall I had some blood work done which came back for the most part OK. Of course there were some issues that concerned my doctor.

He told me that several factors in my life point to something called metabolic syndrome or Syndrome X. If you know me, then you know that it drives me crazy that everything in life has to be caused by a "syndrome" and be labeled as such. This condition makes me prone to heart disease and other bad things. His recommendation was that the easiest thing I could do to effect this would be to change my diet. He suggested what would be like a diabetic diet that limited the amount of carbs in the diet. After trying both the TNT Diet and the Zone Diet, both are good but weren't a good fit for me - I am trying the Paleo Diet. Very similar to both the other diets but this one looks like one for me.

I will be posting my starting stats tomorrow.