I haven't felt this exhausted in my bones for a while - I had a client meeting the next day, and they remarked on how tired I looked. 

It started off with seeing my sister in NYC, then headed up to Boston to see a (former) San Diego friend who moved there with his girlfriend... then ended with a wonderful wedding in NC. 

I have to say - I loved being back on the East Coast. While the weather didn't agree with me, it was a nice reminder of who I am in my bones - I'm culturally Southern. I was asked many times on this trip how much longer I planned on living in SD. The short answer is I don't know. Nothing ties me down here, except the feeling that this is *home* for me now. 

There's a short list of cities I could see myself living in after San Diego: Barcelona, New York, and Boston. When I settle down, I want to move somewhere in the South or Midwest - I don't think SD is the best for raising a family. But we'll see. 

. . .

I've decided to start a soft diet after talking to a friend about the paleo diet. My willpower when it comes to food is non-existent, so this will be a gradual process. This month, I plan on avoiding sodas, Jamba Juice, and fast food. If I can accomplish those three, that'll be a big achievement for me (especially JJ - I LOVE that stuff). 

I realized it's such a shame that I work out, and then eat junk food to basically cancel that out. So let's see what happens this month...

I just suspended 223,000 accounts from Tabulas - in about 2 weeks they'll go through the deletion process. This has shrunk Tabulas by 66% in user count, but I think we've gained a lot more in quality. 

The first step to getting Tabulas back on the road to recovery is to deal with the rampant spam problem. I've been tackling it on various fronts over the past few years - but today the ban hammer came down hard. I won't get into details, but spammers had been running past the spam filters by not posting any spammy content, but instead setting their user description with spammy links. 

I started running the spam filters against the user descriptions, but decided to take a more extreme measure and simply set to delete all accounts with no entries and no images. I then cleared out all unclaimed accounts (~30,000) for a total of about 250,000 accounts removed (or set to be removed) from Tabulas. 

The site is down to about 115,000 users, but I think the quality (and the discoverability) of the community should rise. 

I also shut off user registrations for Tabulas - I don't ever plan on opening up completely free registrations. I will be looking at implementing a invite system that will allow valued members of Tabulas to invite their friends into the system. 

It seems a bit backward to be proud of deleting so many accounts (I can no longer say Tabulas is 500,000 users strong), but it feels like the right thing to do. This great post from Dalton made me realize that even with 115K users, we have critical mass with Tabulas. I'm convinced we can make this community great again. 

Future idea: limit # of friends to 50 users per accounts. 

So I've been tracking all my eating habits through this app on my phone. I've deviated from my plan a bit (I gave in and got some Mickie D's last night after a KILLER workout day), but for the most part, I've been eating much healthier. 

What I don't understand is this: My weight right now is a shy under 174lbs. According to almost every online body calculator, I'm right at the edge of overweight - the ideal body weight is 167lbs. That makes no sense to me. I don't feel particularly fat (although I have a little bit of a belly), I'm not sure I'm holding 5lbs+ in my stomach. The range of men at my age at 5'10" is supposed to be 132lbs to 174lbs - but I don't understand how it's possible to be 132lbs at 5'10" without being incredibly skinny. 

I'll do another weight check next week - but I haven't seen much movement in my weight since I started really working hard last week. I've cut back on the caloric intake - I've been consistently about -150 net calories (goal 1700 per day), so I should be losing weight...

My guess is either this app is overcalculating exercise calories (I'm going to attach the heart monitor for my run today), or whatever fat I'm losing I'm making up in muscle. 

roy

I've been trying to get better at running stairs. Part of this is also running to the stairs, which is tough for me. I've never been accustomized to running long distances. Sprints, yes. Distances, no. I tried running cross country for a day in high school before I gave that up. I ran track for a bit (100m and 200m was about the best I could do). 

So this is a tough task. 

In any case, I've run the stairs 8 of the last 11 days. I'm pretty happy with that - every time I go, I feel myself getting stronger and more accustomed to running stairs. When I first started, I could barely do a single run without being winded. I can do 3 sprints without being winded. The next step will be to be able to do that for long periods of time - my goal is to be able to do 3 sets of 3 sprints up the stairs. 

The stairs themselves are pretty intense (they're at the San Diego Convention Center): 

This picture is actually misleading: there is another flight of stairs past the vantage point of this picture. In total, I believe there are about 80 stairs or so to run. A pretty intense workout. 

I had to buy new shoes: the first time, I had intense burning on the outer parts of my feet. 

Lately, my problem hasn't been getting winded, but my shins. Today, I could only do 5 runs before I felt like somebody had kicked me simultaneously in both my shins at the same time. Insane pain. 

I've been coupling the runs with an evening workout: while I had been working out by myself in the evening, I've been getting pulled into classes lately... which is tough to do after your ass and legs feel like they've been lit on fire. 

But I'll be honest: it feels great after. I'm going to try to be able to get through a full run down to the convention center stairs, be able to do 3 sets of 3 sprints up and down the stairs (for a total of 9 runs), and run back before going to do a workout. That'll be a helluva 90 minute workout. 

Weight check: 171lbs. I lost 3lbs the first week, but this week's been slower. 

And now, something a little less serious:

Weighed myself yesterday - 169 lbs. I'm dropping on average about 2 lbs a week, which was my goal. Frankly, I'm a little disappointed it's not a little more, but I guess I'm outside the 10% range ("don't drop more than 10% of your weight a week") so I should be fine. 

I've noticed no adverse effects in terms of my energy or sleeping - I'm at a pretty high energy level and my body isn't starving for energy. Seems about 1700 net calories target is a good number for me (according to my calorie tracker, I average about 1300 net calories per day). 

As far as workouts go, my morning MWF workouts are boxing workouts, while TR are pilates (reformer and cadillac, not mat). I've been supplementing that with stair runs in the evening, along with another 1 - 1.5 hour workout in the evening (whatever I want to do - usually I do more of the boxing workouts). 

I'll say that boxing workouts are my favorite - it feels so good to hit something, and it wears me out significantly faster than any other exercise. 

Oddly enough, my sleeping has become more irregular lately - I've had to take an Advil PM to go to sleep every night. Not sure what that root cause is, since my body is completely wiped. 

Of course, pushing myself hard during the week has caused many ailments to start flaring up. The aforementioned shin splints are the most painful, and the one which affects my ability to exercise the most. Besides that, I'm in a constant state of soreness. Standing up and picking things up is always a pain. Getting out of bed in the morning is one of the hardest things I do on a daily basis. But it feels great!

My shoulder and back have started complaining a bit (not from pulling, but from just being overworked). Time to hit the roller!

To deal with problems with spammy comments, I just added support for Facebook comments. This serves as a fallback mechanism - if you're not logged in with Tabulas, and the user has enabled it, then you can comment with FB directly. 

I'm not totally sold on this mechanism, but the alternative is writing a lot of code to deal with spam, and honestly, that's not a great solution. 

Let's see how this works. I definitely need to spend some time cleaning up the commenting options, though. It's a mess in the control panel!