Loopy is how I have been most of the day. It could be because I am an idiot about going to bed so only slept 5.5 hours last night, or it could be because yesterday I was only taking a third to a half dose of the drops that go with the (arguably just as smelly and vile) three different kinds of herbal pills on this detox thing. 10-15 != 30. I have no idea why I thought it was 10 drops twice daily instead of 30. For someone who has two degrees in what could be considered applied math, I can be very stupid about simple arithmetic.
It’s probably a combination of going up to full strength on the drops and the fatigue that have made me feel out of it today, but I’m very glad today is a stat holiday in BC because I wouldn’t have been at all productive at work. Still, it was a good day.
This morning Mounir and I went grocery shopping to stock up for the rest of the detox cleanse. Safeway had a bunch of buy-multiples-and-get-air-miles deals, so the bags were very heavy. As we struggled from the elevator to our door, he was accusing me of having chosen lighter bags. I conceded that he might have more heavy canned tomatoes in his but we needed the bathroom scales to settle it. He was carrying just over 50 lbs of food and I was carrying just over 40 lbs. Excel quickly showed, though, that he was only carrying 24% of his weight while I was carrying 31%. Mounir thought this resorting to ratios instead of absolute numbers, since we’re not on The Biggest Loser, was unfair and made me the biggest sore loser. I claimed it made me the strongest-but-obviously-not-physically-biggest loser.
That wasn’t the extent of my exercise for the day, though. Rachael and I went on an excellent ~90 minute hike through the UBC Endowment Lands. There were a lot of dogs and their owners out on the trails, and a bunch of runners too. (I’m both dreading and looking forward to getting back to running with the mini adventure boot camp next week.) Anyway, the fresh air and trees and being surrounded by greenery were all great, and even greater was that the sun was out from behind the clouds by the end of it. Best of all, Mounir had dinner almost ready when I got home so we had an early dinner of grilled tuna, steamed broccoli and carrots, brown rice and lemon-dill tahini sauce. It was delicious.
NaBloPoMo seems a little bit greater today than it did before. SupaCoo’s comment on my previous entry led me to her very amusing blog. Her exercise-related posts led me this insane-sounding NFL abdominal workout. 250 reps (of 17 exercises) in less than 7 minutes = just over 35 reps per minute. That sounds more reasonable than it probably is — I have no idea what my pace is for crunches or bicycles or whatever. The math intrigues me, I may have to try it this week.
Reasons this whole self-imposed no-wheat-no-dairy-no-sugar regime wasn’t very realistic for more than four days:
1. Seven years ago today Mounir and I went out for our first dinner alone, so really, we had to do the same tonight. My stomach was being temperamental so we opted not to go to the Thai restaurant that was the site of our first date, and instead walked to our local chophouse. We didn’t have dessert but the bread that came while we were waiting for our starters was fresh and hot and good. So was the mushroom velouté on my polenta, and the red wine. I was super phlegm-y this morning despite 4 days of abstemiousness, so I think maybe there’s some other allergy at play.
2. Tomorrow afternoon we’re test tasting wedding cake. I’m looking forward to the wheat, sugar dairy trifecta.
Things that make me not want to exercise, a short and incomplete list:
1. fatigue
2. sore feet
3. phlegm and other ailments
4. rain
Despite the presence of all four demotivators, I walked to work this morning. It took until 2 or 3 pm for my trousers to dry out from the knee down; my socks only stopped feeling soggy an hour or so ago. Heavy showers laugh in the face of my compact folding umbrella.
Tomorrow the forecast calls for more rain. I’m planning to swim in the morning and hoping the hot tub and sauna afterwards will make me willing to face the rest of the day.
Last week’s class was about holds and how those can add interest and variety on the social dance floor. I should have written down the main patterns we tried, because I’ve forgotten them all. Thus I’m recording this for myself. At tonight’s class we were working on rhythm.
Zap ba badidah za za zapidah
Okay, so it wasn’t one of the best laid plans, but the plan to go climbing after work didn’t pan out. As I was leaving work I realized I’d left my harness and climbing shoes in a bag at home. Michael was going anyway and I didn’t want to let this near-daily work out habit slip so I resigned myself to paying the stupid tax and renting gear I already own. When we arrived at Cliffhanger it looked packed. Assuming the hordes were going to increase the waiting around:climbing ratio, I was no longer willing to pay for the opportunity to stuff my feet into shoes in which who knows how many other people had sweated. So I walked back to work.
I was still at work when Michael came back from bouldering, so at least I had company for most of the walk home. Given that I walked to and from work, and Cliffhanger, and a meeting, and lunch, I still consider myself to have exercised today. From Gmaps Pedometer, it appears I walked at least 5.7496 miles. Some of that was uphill both ways, too. So that my biceps and triceps won’t atrophy, tomorrow morning I’ll do some push ups and dips and next week I’ll be climbing on Tuesday. With my red shoes that no one but me has sweated in.
Instead of doing the Wild Rose Detox, I’m just cutting out wheat, dairy and sugar until I no longer feel like doing so. How’s that for commitment? I just really don’t feel like dealing with the “laxaherb” portion of the detox pills. But this morning marks the beginning of my abstention from wheat, dairy and all forms of sugar, assuming you (like me) don’t count whey protein as dairy. Or the fake sweetening they put in the chocolate protein powder as sugar. Hmm, there more than likely was wheat in the leftover pumpkin kibbeh the in-laws packed up for me after dinner last night. But the leftover delicious green bean and tomato stew and mujadara (lentils & rice) that made up my the remainder of my lunch and dinner were totally kosher, so to speak.
In an attempt to make myself feel better about this less than complete elimination of the components of my diet that may or may not be increasing my congestion and phlegminess, I decided to read more extreme, hippy-diet type blog entries, like this one on superfoods (to make a grocery list for tomorrow) and this one on green drinks that are not so good. The one I’ve been drinking doesn’t contain wheat or fermented soy, which is good. It still tastes like crap, which is less good. If I made my own I could add basil, but I don’t have that kind of time. Or a juicer.
The protein shake kept me going through my last personal training session in the near future. We did yet another move that felt much harder than you’d think it ought to: lying on a mat with arms by my side and my forehead and upper body flat on the mat (to protect the lower back), I lifted my legs a reasonable but not huge distance off the floor and moved them back and forth, as though making a narrow and wing-less snow angel while faceplanted. That was one of the longest minutes (or possibly two) of my life.
By 10 a.m. this morning I not only tried out my new Get Ripped! to the Core DVD, but had some delicious left-over sushi for breakfast, had a nice soak in an Epsom salty bath, drank my repulsive-textured Greens plus Multi plus vitamin concoction and wrote a submitted a review of the DVD to Amazon.ca. It’s not clear if I’m allowed to post it here, too, so you’ll just have to read it on the product page if/when it shows up. The brief synopsis is that it’s good but Jari Love’s bangs are distracting so I only gave it 4 stars.
While getting ripped to the core I noticed that I now love the burn to the point that I might be a burn junkie: when I wasn’t feeling it, I’d switch to the harder version of the exercise. Masochists R Us.
Related to my delicious but unconventional tuna sashimi breakfast, my brother sent me a link to a band he claims are better than Lily Allen: the Duloks. I still prefer Lily, but their Bad Vegetarian song is super fantastic. A snippet of the lyrics:
“I saw you eat da phish! You are a bad vegetarian!”
I am indeed a bad vegetarian, because da phish is an easy, delicious source of protein. Also superfantastic: this video of Ethan Winer playing 37 separate cello tracks (including percussion on a cello), layered over each other to create a Cello Rondo.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana. – Groucho Marx
I want a core like a pear. - Christina
Tonight I made sweet potato and pear soup. As I was halving the pears and cutting/ripping out their cores, I was intrigued by the small rope of core that goes up to the stem and down to the whatever-it’s-called-at-the-bottom. It comes out as a whole if you pull it properly, even if it’s buried under non-corey fruit. I want the muscles of my core to be strong like that, and to hold me up from stem to whatever-it-is. So I suppose I want to be pear-shaped, at least on the inside.
I did 20 minutes of Pilates upon waking at 5:22 this morning, and walked part of the way to and from work. Tomorrow morning I plan to try out my new Get Ripped to the Core dvd; I haven’t yet been able to say its name without yelling Ripped and Core. In bold italics. Especially when I’m saying it in my head.
The male host of Dancing with the Stars said something like that in the few minutes I caught of it earlier in the week. He might have said chutzpah not motivation, or popularity, or something like that. But it’s motivation (and publishing my silly goals on the internet) and muscle memory that will keep me going.
Friday after work Rachael and I walked from my work, along the Sea Wall and up the hill to my place before picking up Kirsti and heading over to Mandy’s to eat and knit and stuff. At one point Rachael mentioned her theory on Winners, which is that you always find something but it’s never what you went there looking for. Saturday was the exception that proved the rule, for me: I went looking for a suit (ideally black); with Mounir’s assistance (I’m not marrying him because he’s so good at picking out clothes that look great on me, but it’s a very nice perk), I found and acquired three, one of which was black. Which was great — I like wearing suits to work and it was time for some more variety. However, since I’d bought two other suits at a consignment store on Granville earlier in the week, it was also time to clean out the closet.
This whole personal training thing is causing me to reevaluate my previously uninformed biases about the practice of using a personal trainer. I always figured people who went to personal trainers were hardcore athletes or actors/public figures whose bodies were pivotal to their ability to earn money, or executives who had more money than time and were intensity junkies, or women with body image disorders, or rich people who were bored and had nothing better to do and (if you believe stupid TV show premises) might be having affairs with their trainers. The one friend of mine (that I know of) who’s signed up for regular personal training sessions in the past fits the intensity junky/short on time generalization.
Based on my stereotyping categories, the need for intensity seems closest to my motivation too. I went climbing tonight for the second time since injuring my foot in August; the intensity of it, even at the fairly novice level I’m at, definitely appeals to me though I often whine about it as I suffer through the pain or fear it causes.
Michael, my climbing buddy, has been pushing me to attempt more overhangs, because they sketch me out. Tonight I both proved to myself that I’m no longer intimidated by the mild overhang at the top of a 5.7 route on one wall, and freaked out on two other routes (a 5.8 and a 5.9) because I was quite certain I was going to die. I knew on one level it was entirely irrational, because Michael wasn’t going to drop me and if I lost hold of the wall I was at most going to bruise myself. But despite not being afraid of heights and trusting Michael, the rope and the knots not to screw up, when my body weight is pulling me away from the wall and I need to move one of my arms to the next hold, my fear of falling of kicks into overdrive. As does my ability to visualize myself swinging towards an angly bit at the edge of an overhang and splitting open my head or poking an eye out, even though laws of physics would have to be violated for that to happen. I didn’t complete either of the scary routes but I came close on the 5.8 and I felt great about it when I got down to the ground again. So yes, putting myself in difficult or challenging situations must be something I enjoy, or I wouldn’t keep doing it.
Why am I revisiting the assumptions about why people hire personal trainers? Because I’ve paid for two sessions a week until November 5th and it makes sense to articulate why I’m doing this, in order to achieve as much as possible out of it. Plus this guy thinks it’s important. Additionally, this morning T’ai wasn’t able to make it so Chrissy and I were left to train ourselves, which highlighted to me the benefit having a trainer provides. Thus, a list (I like lists, if you haven’t already noticed; I am also overfond of parenthetical asides):
1. Accountability, both financial and personal: having a walking/climbing/running/dancing buddy who is counting on me to show up and work out with them is helpful; having a trainer counting on me to show up plus having money committed that I don’t want to waste is even more helpful.
2. Being pushed to my limits and discovering I’m capable of more than I thought: this morning Chrissy and I did a reasonably thorough and hard workout. I wasn’t exhausted the way I was after last Wednesday’s session, though, even though we repeated the two most challenging exercises: dips with our feet up on a stability ball, and push ups with one hand on a medicine ball and the other hand on the mat (rolling the ball from one hand to the other in between each push up). I’d told Rob the RMT about them at my massage Wednesday afternoon, and he accused T’ai of violating the Geneva convention with that sort of torture. This morning, though, I stopped just short of torturing myself; I may have done more reps of the dips, but didn’t do as many of the push ups, and didn’t feel as rubbery-yet-accomplished after either.
Which brings me to the third reason — there are more, but if I get to bed right this instant I still won’t get 7 hours of sleep, so three will do for now:
3. Variety: I’ve been surprised by all the new exercises T’ai has thrown at us. They’re almost all things I can do at home on my own or with Mounir, but every session we do something new. Variety rocks. I hate being bored; being challenged to try something new, even if I wouldn’t inflict it on the most evil war criminal in the history of war criminals, is fun. I could buy (and have bought) DVDs that will push me and provide the physical part of the challenge, but having a trainer means someone else is responsible for keeping it new and mentally challenging.
