More on body composition

I realized today that I left a critical stat out of yesterday's BodPod post: I am 5'9" tall. So you can probably put together that in addition to being very lean, there is very little muscle on my body. It hasn't always been this way....

When I headed off to college over a decade ago, I was almost the same height and weighed the same that I do now. At school I joined the rowing team and over the course of the next three years packed on about ten pounds of muscle. My peak rowing weight was 142, which still made me a very small lightweight rower (the bigger lightweights loved me because I made the boat average). During my senior year I was burnt out on rowing, and switched to coxing for the team. The coxswain is the person who sits in the boat, steers, and motivates the crew; since they are dead weight in the boat, you want them to be as light as possible and men's coxswains have a minimum weight of 120.

Seeing how hard my boat was training, I didn't want to slow them down at all and worked to drop as much weight as I could. Since I was about 8% body fat at 142, this meant that I had to drop muscle, and the only way to do this is cutting calories. From the January of my senior year until our season championship in early May, I managed to knock my weight down to 122, with a body fat of around 3-4%. This was one of the most miserable experiences of my life, made all the more painful by the fact that I was coxing heavyweight guys who were eating more in a meal than I was all day! Within a week of the end of season my body weight was back up to the low 130s, and that's where I've been ever since.

I would like to put a little more muscle on, about five pounds total (three in the lower body, two in the upper), but it's not important enough to me to do the requisite weight lifting right now. Also, this is largely for aesthetic reasons and additional weight, even muscle, may work against me in my running. Road cycling and distance running are dominated by people my size, many who look improbably scrawny for the speeds that they compete at. I could definitely use a little more leg muscle for cycling, but I don't think more than a couple of pounds: in 2003 I was in phenomenal cycling shape (especially climbing) at a similar weight to where I am now. I do some occasional weight training now, but it isn't anything that will result in any real muscle gain.

As mentioned yesterday, I will get BodPodded again around the time of my race to see if my training has led to any body comp changes. Based on my race results and if I decide to keep running or make the swing mack to cycling (more likely), I may look to start a more structured strength regimen, especially for the lower body.