Ten Miles.

December and January have been pretty light months for me, running-wise. Well, as compared with the prior year. I just eclipsed 60 miles in each month. In January, I needed to have a nice long run over the weekend to achieve that. BB and I went out for ten miles on Saturday morning. It was hard. My endurance has definitely lapsed some. But I was happy to get it in.

The difference between running about 15 miles a week and about 25 miles a week is really a big difference for me. Looking at it on the screen doesn’t seem so big, but to run 25 miles in a week, I basically have to be doing double digit mile runs every weekend. That’s a big time commitment, and a big time commitment during the week to get in the three five milers I need to support a long weekend run like that.

What I’ve been doing with all the time I’m not running has been gym work. Gym work is weird. I can do chin-ups now, when I never could before. Sometimes as many as four in a row, if I only go down half way. Next I’m going to work on pull-ups, which target the back more than the biceps. Gym work is oddly satisfying because I can detect the work by how I can lift heavier things, and do more repetitions, but I don’t know if I see the physical results visually.

But I do need to maintain my focus on what matters. The reason I want to do pull-ups is not that I expect to need to pull myself up the side of any buildings, or expect somehow to have a back like Dwayne Johnson. I want to do pull-ups because the Latissimus is a huge muscle group, and by building it up it should help improve my insulin sensitivity. I’m doing the same thing with my glutes, which have been nonexistent since puberty.

As vain as I can be about all this fitness stuff, that really is the goal. Develop the constitutional robustness needed to stave off the inevitable onset of type 2 diabetes. That means especially developing the muscle groups that ought to be large consumers of sugar. Muscle groups that the indolence of my sedentary 20s and early 30s allowed to atrophy into uselessness.

But I’ve made great strides, and my work physical is coming up. I’ll know my A1c and my fasting glucose. I expect them to be about where they’ve been for 5 years: elevated but sub-diabetic. Which remains my goal. Normal sugar levels are probably beyond my reach at this point, but the efforts I’ve put in are keeping me healthy. And I am happy and gratified about that.