Futile was my search for poetry online about sore muscles and/or feeling the burn, and then I remembered this picture from my flickr stream.
When we saw this cactus on the edge of a cliff on Maui last year, I was compelled to pretend to sit on it. About 15 years ago my best friend composed the following masterpiece of a poem for an English assignment:
I sit upon a cactus.
Ow.
My butt hurts.
And it did hurt when the wind blew and for a millisecond or seven I wasn’t actually pretending to sit on the cactus.
Despite the many squats and duck walks and push up tests (I “only” did 30) and horizontal arm rotations what went on for frickin ever and tripods (one-armed plank) that were part of Wild Card Wednesday, it is not my butt that hurts, nor my arms or upper back. No, it is my calves. I have no idea why.
Tomorrow it will surely be my abs that protest, for tomorrow is Stability Ball Thursday.
This morning’s boot camp consisted of a lot of boxing drills and a bit of one-on-one punching through the pads T’ai had on his hands. So much fun, but so knackering too. The muscles along the side of my back are sore, especially on the right side (because I punch with my right, jab with my left). Watching boxing on TV (or even worse, live) has no appeal for me — I don’t like watching violence — but having a first-hand understanding of a little bit of the skills they need makes me admire boxers more, in the abstract. Doing more boxing-specific training at some point appeals, as long as I never have to hit someone’s face.
I didn’t enjoy boxing as much the day we did it at the first boot camp I attended, this time last year. Having a few more tries to synchronize all the movements makes it only a little easier, but it removes some of the frustration of just not being able to make my limbs do what I want them to.
Another thing that’s improved a lot in the last year is my ability to jump rope. The first camp I kept tripping over the rope and was hard pressed to skip more than ten times without getting tangled in it. The second boot camp, last February, I committed to not being afraid of it anymore, and once managed 55 jumps in a row (I was counting). Today our warm up was jumping rope for about ten minutes, and I only stopped a couple of times due to badly timed jumps (and a few more times because of coughing and not being able to breathe). I also managed to spin the rope and jump faster than ever before, though I’m still nowhere near able to skip as fast as boxers or skilled elementary schoolers.
This morning’s inaugural boot camp session was good fun. Things I’m particularly happy about:
1. I can run again! We ran around the new indoor location for two and a half songs to warm up, so not quite ten minutes, and my foot (and the rest of me) felt great. The weak part of my foot feels a tiny bit tender now, so I’ll contrast bath it tonight.
2. The intensity level was pretty high, and I mostly only coughed when I stopped moving. After the warmup we were alternating between agility courses (hoop-running, hurdles, agility ladder and running lines) and upper body weight-lifting at our mats (alternating incline rows, then an upright row-lateral raise-bicep curl-press up sequence, then tricep extensions lying down), and then did five or ten minutes of abdominals (plank, crunches, hip raises, bicycles) before stretching. I also worked up quite a sweat (which, in the two weeks of exercising on my own, really only happened with the Get RIPPED to the Core! DVD), so I’m hoping I burned and sweated out the rest of this cold.
3. After boot camp I went back to sleep for an hour. From 2:30am onwards it felt like I was waking up every ten minutes or so (from strange dreams of monster invasions and finding a wallet that was stolen years ago, and hanging out with people I haven’t seen since high school, and other people having affairs with Keira Knightley) — with that extra sleep I now feel ready to face the day.
4. This has nothing to do with boot camp, but did you know that London Drugs is one of the places you can get a marriage licence in Vancouver? It’s true.
Also, apparently it’s not against the law in British Columbia to marry your cousin. From the Application for Marriage Licence pdf, “A man may not marry his Grandmother Mother Daughter Granddaughter Sister” and “A woman may not marry her Grandfather Father Son Grandson Brother” — you’d think now that same sex weddings are legal they’d add language preventing women from marrying their female relatives and men from marrying their male relatives.
Filed under: NaBloPoMo
The plague is still making me cough and sneeze, etc. I’m so looking forward to waking up at 5 am tomorrow and heading to the first day of the My Adventure Boot Camp two week mini-camp. I may actually need to wake up 15 minutes before five, in order to clear enough snot out of my head that I can run and do whatever else T’ai has in store for us.
I’m tired of whining, though, and lying on the couch coughing up lungs is getting boring so I’ve been reading the blogs of other NaBloPoMo participants. I clicked on blog titles pretty much at random (titles that appealed to me had a better hit-rate) and only got part way through the As (after the people-donating-prizes and numbers) before there were too many tabs open in my browser. Here are some entries I’ve particularly enjoyed, in no particular order:
The whole boil water advisory thing has got me thinking about risk. In the last year or so I’ve read things in the New York Times and Ideal Bite (which, if you’ve never heard of it, is an excellent newsletter and website about small, non-hippy changes you can make in the interests of sustainability and the environment) about the dangers of non-stick/Teflon pans. Apparently if overheated, the non-stick coating releases toxic gasses.
I like our stainless steel pots and pans. Cast iron cookware is great too. But I’ve been trying to cook with less oil and non-stick pans make that easier. Also, I have yet to get a cast iron pan seasoned enough that I’m able to cook eggs in it and not spend hours scraping the eggy residue off afterwards.
So I turned to the internet for answers to the question “are all non-stick pans dangerous?” So far, the internet hasn’t achieved consensus: Continue reading
1. I didn’t floss last night, because I slept in the den to avoid contaminating Mounir with my disgusting cold (my idea, not his) and therefore didn’t have to go past the floss on my way to bed. I’m sleeping in the den again tonight but will get back on that daily flossing horse.
2. My exercise today consisted of pumping water through a filter Mounir got when he was in Africa nearly a decade ago, because boiling the really gross water that is coming out of our taps doesn’t make it any less cloudy. I thought about doing crunches, and decided that the return to boot camp on Monday is close enough for jazz. Establishing a habit where I exercise even when sick enough that I stayed home from work and slept all day = not on.
3. I really miss cheese, and there’s some asiago in our fridge that is calling my name. I’m resisting its siren call and not falling off the detox diet, but it’s only today I started missing verboten foods. Oh, I’m also craving Jaffa Cakes, which I haven’t eaten in about two years. This evening I didn’t take the Laxaherb portion of the detox pills, because either that or the water is causing issues.
To offset all that whininess and failure, the following YouTube videos from the 2006 Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown make me happy and make me want to be a better dancer:
In a meeting this morning I sneezed. I was fine over sushi at lunch with Mounir and his minions. By 2 pm, back at my desk, I was sniffling and making trips to the washroom every half hour or so for toilet paper (I don’t know where my emergency handkerchief and kleenex pack wandered, but they’re no longer in my filing cabinet). By 6 pm over dinner I was whining that I was dying, but it was still all in my sinuses. Now I’m still sniffling and sneezing, and my throat hurts too.
I skipped dance class tonight because I thought it best to keep my germs to myself. Because yesterday was my weekly day of rest from exercise, I need to do something workouty today. I guess I’ll do twenty pushups and some crunches on the stability ball and call it good.
I don’t recall being around anyone sickly lately, so who knows where I got this sudden-onset cold. I doubt it was from the disgustingly turbid, brown, murky tap water Vancouver’s currently providing, even though I did brush my teeth this morning with it before learning the boil water advisory had been issued. Still, I’d like to conclude that the moral of the story is that tooth brushing gives you colds.
The best part of yesterday’s storm? The old guy interviewed on TV, who’d moved away from the windows 5 minutes before a tree came crashing into the house on the spot he’d been, saying that his wife (before the tree crash) had called him “a chicken face.”
Chicken face chicken face chicken face.
Okay, so “lazy-ass detox recipes” wasn’t exactly the search term that brought several people here from search engines, but it’s what I’ve got. This week has been too busy for extensive cooking. Two recipies justifies a plural, no?
Lemon Tahini Dill Dressing (a variation on the Lemon Tahini Dressing on this page):
I blended the following together in our mini food processor:
2/3 c plain soy milk (So Nice Unsweeetened is fortified, made from organic soybeans and 100% free of animal products)
7 (or more) tablespoons lemon juice
1 garlic clove
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 cup tahini
1 teaspoon dried mint
1/4 cup fresh chopped dill
It took less than 5 minutes, including adding more lemon juice and dill to make it tangier and dillier. So far I’ve enjoyed it on steamed vegetables, brown rice and, best of all, mixed together with a bit of brown rice and a can of tuna to make a detox-friendly version of tuna salad. Some celery for crunch would have been good in that too. Next time.
Mixed bean salad (Mounir’s invention this evening, and I modified it for myself when I got home from my massage and chiropractor session):
In a microwaveable mixing bowl, zap a cup or so of frozen vegetables until not frozen any longer. (Mounir chose corn at 30 seconds, I finished off the bag of broccoli and carrots from Costco which took 2.5 minutes.) I suppose you could also steam them if you’re less impatient than we are. Once you’re no longer likely to give yourself tooth sensitivity biting into the veg, add to the bowl:
1 (14 ounce?) can mixed beans, rinsed and drained
a good squirt of lemon juice (probably one lemon’s worth)
salt and pepper to taste
1 to 2 tablespoons Udo’s oil or olive oil
one handful fresh chopped cilantro (optional but I love it.)
Mix everything together and eat straight out of the bowl.
If you’re willing to do a bit more prepwork, Leek-Tomato Quinoa sounds yummy and would also fit the Wild Rose D-Tox meal plan (if you make your own chicken stock), as would Kasha With Browned Onions and Walnuts.
I’ve found some more links about detox diets in general and Wild Rose specifically. In case they’re of interest to others: Continue reading
Today’s after work climbing adventure with Vivian and Michael was an off day. I skipped any sort of warm-up route and started with one of the 5.9s that made me think I was going to die last time I tried it. I got to the same scary move-to-the-other-wall point and couldn’t get the strength to get to a hold that was a bit of a reach.
Some of the weakness was probably psychosomatic, but since I didn’t feel as freaked out as the other time I think more of it was a result of the detox. I tried two 5.8s, one of which I’ve completed before, and only got about half way up the wall both times. Quitting didn’t feel particularly good, but I did feel like I was still learning and improving on the lower half.
The last route I tried, another 5.8, had no overhangs so I didn’t need as much power and I was able to get to the top quite quickly despite increasing gastrointestinal discomfort. It was good to finish as a non-quitter but next time I’d better be less of a delicate flower.
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.
Boot camp and beyond 