Let It Snow!!!

We had a great blizzard here last night and today! The city and state declared a state of emergency and asked everyone to stay off the roads (coming from Minnesota, it was a bit of an over-reaction), so I spent the day at home, working in my comfortable chair with a fire going, watching the snow swirl outside the window. Beautiful! Here's a picture of the file cabinet man in our front yard through the snow:

The bad part of the storm is that my training appointment got cancelled. I hate taking off two days in a row. I considered working out at home, but I'm going to work out at Fitness Together both Thursday and Friday, and don't want to overdo it.

I read a really interesting article in livestrong, talking about the value of interval training. Here's the link:
 
http://www.livestrong.com/article/113860-interval-training-burn-fat/

The article talked about how you can train at higher intensity and burn more fat by doing interval training--alternating periods of very high intensity with recovery periods. It also talked about how you are less fatigued training that way. The timing of the article was perfect, because I had been puzzling about the differences between my training on Saturday and Monday at spinning class. Both days my legs were dead. I had had a really hard training on Friday which led to dead legs on Saturday. On Monday, I had done 120 squats, which resulted in my legs being dead Monday night. Saturday, Peggy led an endurance class where she was basically trying to keep our heart rates constant throughout the hour, with neither high periods of intensity nor breaks between songs. I struggled throughout the hour and couldn;t get my heart rate above the 140s.

On Monday, though, Peggy led us in interval training, and I was able to get my heart rate up into the 150s and 160s pretty quickly and return to that level regularly throughout the hour, even though my legs were very tired. As a measure of how much harder I was able to work out, I ended up burning about 75 more calories in the same hour time by alternating periods of high intensity with recovery. Again, this is something I wish I'd known when I was doing inline skating marathons. I would push myself to maximum effort for the whole 26.2 miles. I would get really fatigued and think I had no fuel left to burn and eat some caffeinated goo, thinking the caffeine and sugar would get me going again. I can now see that if I had alternated sprinting with recovery, I would have had more energy and probably would have finished in less time.

I really wish I could use this knowledge in another marathon. What I need is a long term goal other than getting in shape and losing weight. The North Shore Inline Marathon every September in Duluth, Minnesota has been that goal for many years. I've thought about whether I could have a biking goal--my brother Tom does the ride across Iowa nearly every year. But at this point, both biking and skating make me nervous. There are so many hills around here and I can too easily imagine hitting a bad spot in the road, a rock, or popping a tire and breaking a bunch of bones. Not quite the images I need to inspire me in a biking goal. Similarly, I've only fallen about 5 times in the 15+ years I've done inline skating, but all it takes is once.

Any ideas?


Hey, if you'd like an inspiring story of someone getting into shape, read this one. The before and after pictures are astounding:

http://www.livestrong.com/blog/blog/jacobs-success-story/

Can't Get Enough

Calories on Mondays, that is. My goal is to eat 1,950 calories a day, and at least 1,600 after subtracting the calories I burn exercising. That's hard to do on Mondays. I estimate that I burned 172 calories in 45 minutes at Fitness Together in the morning and my heart rate monitor estimates that I burned 747 at spinning class this evening. That means I need to eat 2,519 calories of food to be at a net 1,600 for the day.

I never in my life have had trouble eating the number of calories I need on a diet. It's usually a struggle to stay within my caloric limit. But this is the first time that my focus is on both the quality of the food I'm eating, along with the calorie count. My goal is to eat food that will support my recovery from exercise and building my muscles and bones. So no sugar or alcohol and no processed food. I also try to eat many small meals during the day to keep my metabolism high.

Here's what I ate today to try to meet my caloric need:

Breakfast before exercising: protein shake with whole fat yogurt, protein powder, banana, blueberries, raspberries, and peanut butter--494 calories
Breakfast after exercising: 2 fried eggs on brown rice with steamed kale--301 calories
Lunch: homemade blackbean soup, toast with melted cheese on it--414 calories
After lunch: apple and cheese--224 calories
After, after lunch: almonds--83 calories
Before spinning: protein bar--230 calories
Dinner (I was not hungry at all, but knew I needed to eat, so I didn't eat the chicken dinner I was going to): yogurt with almonds, blueberries, protein powder, raspberries, pumpkin seeds--584 calories

So after all that food, I had eaten 2,330 calories, netting 1,411 after exercising, 439 short of my goal and 189 short of my minimum. I feel stuffed and can't imagine trying to eat anything more.

I remember reading an article about what Michael Phelps ate on a typical day--he had to eat thousands of calories because of the amount of exercise he does each day. I couldn't understand why he ate so much crap. It makes much more sense to me now. It's hard to get enough calories without putting down a pizza or two.

Anyway, it's a great problem to have, and much preferable to the one I normally have when I'm trying to lose weight!

Head Games

I was excited about going to spinning at the Y today. The class was with Peggy, who really leads tough rides. Peggy led the class on Monday, where I was able to keep my heart rate in the 160s for some of the second half of the class. I wanted to see if I could could keep my heart rate that high for a longer time today, and see what it felt like to hit the 170s.

It didn't happen for a couple of reasons. First, Peggy decided to do an endurance class, focussing on keeping our heart rates at a lower, but constant rate throughout the workout. That meant that we weren't doing the heart-racing combinations of standing for 8-sitting for 8, standing for 4-sitting for 4, and standing for 2-sitting for 2 (with many multiples of each). We did a few 8 counts, but spent much more time standing for a minute or more, sitting for the same length of time.

But probably more important, my legs were dead! While I was able to walk up the stairs after my workout with Brandon yesterday, that workout was tough. I felt discomfort in my quads when we were warming up, but knew I'd get past that. But once I got past the discomfort, there was nothing there. And that feeling of have nothing there spread to my brain--I felt mentally dull, like both my brain and my legs were slogging through mud. That's when I knew I had to start the mind games.

I know from many years of working out that here's a big mental component to being exhausted. I think everyone has had the experience of being completely exhausted, and then something really interesting happens, and suddenly you're awake and have lots of energy.

I went to my old standards to get me going. My favorite is remembering a racket ball tournament I played in nearly 20 years ago, before I blew out my knee. I was in the semi-finals, and had played one or two matches that same day. I was dead in the final game--completely exhausted, dead legs and mind, absolutely nothing left. I started falling behind, and my opponent and the people watching all thought the match was over. Then I started putting everything I had into each point. Between points, I looked like a rag doll, but I wasn't conceeding a point. As I started moving ahead, I think the mental burden moved to my opponent--how can I be losing to this person who is close to dead? I went on to win! Unfortunately, the final match was shortly thereafter, and I was slaughtered.

My second favorite for mental toughness was remembering a playoff game between the Celtics and the Nets in 2002. The Celtics were down by 26 points in the second half and 19 points at the start of the fourth quarter. They never gave up and kept plugging away, and ended up winning the game. I'd never seen such an inspiring example of what it means to give everything and not give up.

So I thought about both of those situations while spinning today. My legs never did stop being dead, but my mind did. I got excited about just doing what I could do. My heart rate was generally in the 140s, not the 160s, but I enjoyed myself and had a good workout.

Hey Hey, Goodbye

Today was my last day training with Brandon. I've been working out with him for 4 years, and even though I know we'll stay in touch, it's sad. It was a lucky happenstance that I discovered Fitness Together and started working out with Brandon. Liz and I were at the Tunnel Bar with our niece Grace having chocolate martinis to celebrate Grace's 21st birthday. We were walking from the bar to Main Street to find a place to eat dinner (yeah, martinis on an empty stomach--not the best idea) and when I saw Fitness Together, I was curious about what they did. I had never worked out with a personal trainer, but in my slightly inebriated state, I immediately thought that working with a personal trainer could give me the edge I needed to do an inline skating marathon in 2 hours. I went in and learned that Brandon also did inline skating and started working out with him shortly thereafter.

Brandon's always challenged me to push myself and I told him for our workout today, I wanted him to push me so hard I'd have to crawl up the stairs at the end of the workout. I was able to walk up the stairs, but had the kind of workout that was fitting for our last one. I know I'll continue to make great progress with the other trainers, but it does feel like the passing of an era. Brandon said he'd come in to do my final assessment for this free training period, which I'm really happy about, because I want him to see the progress he's helped me make, going from sitting in a chair for 6 months to a high level of fitness in 2 months.

Speaking of which, I was talking with Brandon today about how slowly my weight is coming off, given how careful I'm being about eating and how much I'm working out. Brandon reminded me that after sitting for 6 months, I had lost a lot of muscle (yes, when Brandon calculated my percent body fat a month ago, it was not a nice number--40%), so when I'm working out now, I'm really building a lot of muscle, which weighs more than fat. That makes sense, because I can feel the shape of my body shifting. Brandon said that at some point the weight will start coming off fast.

Brandon was named by Business West as one of their "40 under 40" this year--an honor he earned and deserved for how he ran Fitness Together and his contributions to the community. I know he will continue to be successful in whatever he takes on next. Thanks, Brandon, from me and everyone whose lives you've made better by improving their fitness and that of the people they love.

You Can't Always Get What You Want . . .

. . . but if you try sometimes, you just might find, you get what you need. I had a fabulous workout with Seann today. We did lots of push-ups, tricep extensions, dead lift squats, lunges, and fun ab work. It was the first time since I broke my leg that I could do actual lunges without some kind of support.

Here's the crazy thing.  I've been feeling like my workouts with Seann weren't hard enough. First, I dismissed it thinking that he's starting easy and will make it more difficult as he gets a sense of what I'm capable of. Then I've been justifying it by focusing on the parts of the workout that were harder. But I really knew I wasn't working out like I wanted to be, and I wasn't saying anything. I was more worried about Seann feeling bad by me telling him I wasn't working out hard enough than I was on getting what I wanted. I realized yesterday that I'm half way through my two month training, and if I really wanted to accomplish my goals, I needed to say something.

So I told Seann today. He was fine about it and immediately gave me the kind of workout I wanted. It was hard to do and know I'm going to be sore tomorrow, which is what I want. Afterwards I realized that I was somehow expecting Seann to read my mind--to know what kind of workout I wanted. That's really crazy, and I wasn't being fair to either Seann or myself.

Do you want to hear something even crazier? When I use the Wii balance board to weigh myself, it always asks me if I want a fitness tip. Usually I say yes, but lately, I haven't had much time in the morning, so I've just been weighing myself, and saying no to the fitness tip. And I know part of me is worried about hurting the Wii's feelings because I don't want its tips. The WEii's feelings--and I think that even though I know the Wii doesn't have feelings. Hmmmm--I think I was too well socialized as a female and as a Minnesotan. It's a bad combination. Because most of the time, in order to get what you want and need, you need to be able to ask for it.

The Beat, Beat, Beat of My Heart

I love my new heart monitor! I've used a heart monitor extensively when I was training for inline skating marathons. It's not possible, though, to skate and pay a lot of attention to my heart rate--I used the monitor mainly to track my minutes per mile. I'd watch my average heart rate and pay attention to the peaks, but didn't really have a good sense of what my heart rate was doing.

When I used my heart rate monitor at spinning on Sunday, I spent most of the workout in the 135-145 beats per minute range. At one point, I hit 160, but was nervous about it being that high. According to the heart rate charts, at age 60, my maximum heart rate is supposed to be 160, and I was supposed to be working at 80% of maximum, which would be 128. I know that's way too low--when I was inline skating, I would regularly average 150 beats a minute in a 24 mile training skate. But I didn't know how much time I was spending in the 150s and above.

I was braver today. Once I warmed up, I spent most of the workout in the 155-165 beats per minute range, and hit a high of 169. That felt fine--I knew I wasn't working in the anaerobic zone because I wasn't struggling with my breathing and I wasn't feeling any lactic acid build up in my muscles. It really felt great to be able to work out at that  level. I started feeling bad that I may not be able to inline skate again. I will be in such great shape to start training in the spring that I would have a great shot at hitting my goal of a 2 hour marathon. I almost did it a couple of years ago--I was on pace for it in my last few 24 mile training runs, but the day of the marathon, it was 28 degrees (this was in early September) and there was a head wind. It was 28 here today, and everyone is in winter coats and boots. The day of the marathon, I was in shorts and a t-shirt. Who could imagine it would be 28 degrees that early in the year--even in Minnesota. It comes down to whether I'm willing to risk breaking a bone if I fall. I've only fallen a few times in the many years I've skated, but it only takes once to disrupt my life--particularly if I fell on a hip and broke it.

But in the meantime, I'm having a great time working out and spinning--I don't need to worry about what I'm going to do in the spring.

In The Groove

Happy New Year!!!! This is the first New Year's Day I've had in many, many years (40+) where I haven't had anything to drink the night before. It sure makes New Year's Day more pleasant. It's also the first New Year's Day I can recall that I'm unhappy that my health club isn't open. I'm really in a groove of working out every other day, and while I have equipment in the basement, I'm really aware of how difficult it is to push myself as hard as I do when I'm with a trainer or in a class--where is my Saturday spinning class?!??!!

Just in time for my official weekly weight in, I lost .7 of a pound. Brandon assured me that weight loss is not a linear function--some weeks I might lose 3 pounds and others I might not lose any. Intellectually that might be true, but psychologically it's hard to work out as hard as I am, and to carefully manage what I'm eating, without having that number on the scale go down at least a little.

I had two great workouts on Thursday. The first was with Brandon. It was the first time I used the new heart monitor Liz gave me for Christmas. It has the typical chest band, but what makes it cool is that is transmits the information to my iPhone. When I bought my iPhone, the phone part was the least important part of the phone. I spend much more time doing email, going online, texting, listening to music and podcasts, etc., than talking on the phone. As more and more apps become available, the phone part has become even less important (not that I'd give it up). Anyway, it was really interesting to see what my heart rate was as I exercised. I had always thought that the warm-up exercises we did were much more about getting my muscles stretched than elevating my heart rate, but my heart rate was consistently in the 130s to a high of 145 during the warm-ups--the same range it was in while I was exercising.

After warming up, I did 60 push-ups, 60 rows, and then moved to my two favorite exercises of the morning--30 combination squats and presses and 30 combination squats and rows.

 
The combination squat and press was with the 14 pound ball you see in the picture. It's awkward and got slippery because of the sweat on my hands, which increased the difficulty. I love exercises like this that use most of my muscles in one exercise.

 The combination squat and row was even more fun. As you can see in the pictures, I was holding onto a bar. I was using the bar to help me into a deep squat and then when I stood up, was pulling 50 pounds of weight into a row. I like the picture on the left because of the hint of a bicep muscle that's showing. Yes, muscles are reappearing!!!


In the afternoon, I went to spinning at the Y with Donna. I can feel how much stronger I am at spinning classes in the way I hold myself on the bike ( using my abs to hold myself up rather than just using my arms and hands) and by my cadence. I tried to keep up with Donna's cadence, which is something I didn't even attempt a couple of weeks ago. Try is the operative word. I'm amazed at how fast she can rotate the pedals, even during cool down periods. I'd have times I could keep up with her and then it would seem like she was twice as fast as me. I forgot to bring my heart monitor--I'm curious to see what my heart rate is at spinning. About half way through the class, I started feeling pain in my left knee. It only happened when I was pedaling in a standing position, so I sat for the rest of the class. The workout is much harder shifting from sitting to standing, especially when we're going back and forth every 8 seconds, but I really don't want ot injure myself.

All in all, a fun day, and I'm looking forward to more spinning tomorow!