Happy New Year!

I hope you've had a wonderful start to 2014!

I had a nice trip home followed by a wonderful trip to Mexico, but I'm not going to lie; working out while on vacation is hard! I'm not setting any new year's resolutions this year, but I would like to get better at working out while traveling. I love to work out, I love to travel, now I just need to merge the two!

My lack of workouts, and excessive eating, has taken a bit of a toll on me and my post-holiday weight is almost 6 pounds more than my lowest weight of 2013! I am however not really bothered by it at all, which is a huge mental milestone for me! It could be because I know that Ironman training will quickly take care of those extra pounds, but I'd also like to credit my new "it's not a diet, it's a lifestyle" mentality. My old self would have freaked out about any weight gain in the off-season, but for the first time ever I am not beating myself up and you know what; it feels great!

I am by no means ignoring the weight gain or allowing it to increase past this point, but I am being realistic; it's the off-season, it's the holidays and I'm doing more strength training than cardio, all of which has resulted in some weight gain. The biggest thing is that I'm still down 12lbs from my heaviest weight and while my last DEXA scan showed a total weight loss of only 1.5lb, it also showed a 5lb decrease in body fat and a 3.5lb increase in lean muscle, which is AWESOME! That just goes to show that muscle does actually weight more than fat and that the scale alone is not a good indicator of progress.

My goal this year is to gain about 6lb of muscle and hopefully shed 10lbs of fat, which should bring me pretty close to my ideal racing weight. I don't want to bore you with the details of my plan, but if you're interested in a similar plan, send me a message and I highly recommend (yes I've recommended it before and will continue doing so because I just love this book) reading Racing Weight.

This week I'm officially back to the grind. Pablo and I have started base training and in about a month and a half we'll start our official half and full DC Tri Ironman program. I'm also hoping to do some fun other races, so stay tuned for a preview of 2014...it's promises to be an adventurous and athletic year!

What are your 2014 plans and aspirations?