As 2023 settles in, Brownsville runner Carlos Alvarez is marking the third anniversary of his decision to do something about his weight and subsequent embrace of running as the vehicle to achieve his goals.
“I know I made a New Years resolution at the beginning of 2020, when I was at my biggest at 350 pounds,” Alvarez said last week at VentureX, where he is the network administrator for Cruz Technologies and responsible for keeping internet, phone and network services running.
“That was right at the beginning of the pandemic. I started doing dieting. I started doing keto and I stuck with it,” he said. “Right off the bat I lost like 70 pounds in the first three or four months.”
When the gyms reopened in April and May 2020, the Brownsville native started hitting the gym. He stuck to a workout routine and then in 2021 started running. That’s when he really started losing weight, he said.
Today Alvarez’s pant size is 28 compared to 32 when he graduated high school in 2008, he said.
Every year, Alvarez would set a short-term more attainable goal and a long-term one that seemed impossible to reach.
In 2021 Alvarez did his first half marathon, the South Padre Island half marathon “and then I just got really into running,” he said.
“It was at the beginning of 2021 where I set up a goal: I want to be able to do three miles running non-stop, so I started running. I ran a half mile non-stop and I was really vented,” he said.
By April he was able to run three miles non-stop. “Mind you it was a slow three miles. It took maybe 33 minutes to run three miles, but with more work and more work and more work I was eventually able to bring that down to 24 minutes. That was a big accomplishment, so that was my short-term goal for 2021,” he said.
In 2022 his short-term goal was to complete a marathon training plan, with a long-term plan to do the Chicago Marathon, one of the big six marathons in major cities around the world.
He did the Chicago Marathon in October, finishing in 3 hours, 51 minutes, and followed that up with the San Antonio Rock ‘n’ Roll on Dec. 4 and the Brownsville Marathon the following Sunday on Dec. 11.
He plans to run in the Houston Marathon on Jan. 15.
“My goal for that one is to complete it in less than 3 hours and 50 minutes, so right now I’ve just been working on speed, working to kind of bring down my overall time for a marathon. So that’s my goal for January, and then my goal for the end of the year is to complete a half Ironman. It’s where you do a 1.2 mile swim, followed by a 56 mile bike ride followed by a 13.1 mile run,” he said.
“The one I want to do is in Waco. That’s my goal for this year and then I do have a couple of other goals. I’ll be doing the Berlin Marathon as well. Even though I can already do a marathon I’ll be training toward that one to do it in an even better time,” he said.
Alvarez said a really good marathon time is under three hours, with 2.59:59 being the qualifying time for the Boston Marathon. That amounts to running at a rate of six minutes, 45 seconds per mile over the 26.2-mile course, a far cry from barely being able to run three miles without stopping not that long ago.
Alvarez runs with the Orange Theory All-Out Race Club.
“It’s a very good group. We all motivate each other,” he said. “I completed my marathon training with a friend, we did Chicago together. Her name is Eunice Martinez.
What I’m saying is, when it comes to running, when it comes to achieving a long-term goal, it’s always good to also have a friend or a group of friends that are also aiming toward the same goal, especially when it comes to running or biking or working out, having someone to talk to helps you mentally, to distract you. In my case it helped distract me from thinking, Oh man, this is a long run, especially when it comes to the 15-mile, 16-mile or 17-mile runs on the weekends.”
