Doubt and Worry

I haven't posted in a couple of days. It's hard to stay focussed on it on days I don't work out. I rearranged my Fitness Together schedule so now I'll do spinning on Mondays and Saturdays and Fitness Together on Wednesdays and Fridays. I tried calling my doctor's office today to see if I can add in running but kept getting the answering machine with no recording option.

I'm finding myself worrying about whether I will stay on my fitness and nutrition regimen without the level of overview I was getting from Fitness Together. I wasn't aware of how much it influenced me knowing someone was looking at everything I ate and that I had a commitment to someone else to workout 4 times a week. I've haven't been over my eating points ever since I started, but I did have a beer tonight. It tasted really good. I have to keep in mind that if I think my diet is heading south, I can always ask the people at Fitness Together if I can send it in every week. It's not as if asking for support is some shameful thing to be avoided at all costs.

I had a great workout today. I told Savanah that I wanted to be sore tomorrow, so she gave me a workout where everything I did, I did for 20 seconds, rested for 10, and repeated 6 times. I started with pushups--the last 2 sets were murder. Then I did squats with 12 pound weights at shoulder level, going into a press when I stood up. Then I did ab work, starting by sitting on the floor in a vee with my arms and legs in the air, holding a ball and lowering it to the floor on the right side and then the left side, followed by crunches with my legs in the air, reaching my hand to the outside of the opposite leg.

Then onto dips on the bench, lowering myself to work the triceps. Finally, rows using the rings. My body was at about a 45 degree angle from the floor, holding myself with straight arms with the rings, and then pulling myself up.

All in all, just the kind of workout I asked for. When it was happening, I was unhappy that I had requested such a hard workout, but it felt great when it was done. I'm sure I'll be sore tomorrow. Fortunately, it was mostly an upper body workout, so spinning shouldn't be painful.

It Ain't Over

I have 2 weeks left until my next assessment. I'm realizing that I'm starting to think that my training is already done--like there's nothing more I can accomplish in furthering my fitness goals in the next 2 weeks. When I stop to think about it, it's crazy! Two weeks is a full one-fourth of my training period--of course I can increase my fitness level in 2 weeks.

I know I've done this with many things in my life--stopping the race well short of the finish line. In the first place, I'm not going to stop training when my free training period is over, so nothing is really ending. And it's not like I need to taper for my assessment, which is the rationalization I've used for other athletic endeavors. I think it's a self-defeating thing I do. I stop trying before the end, don't achieve my goal, and then have an excuse for not hitting my goal (hey--I didn't prepare the way I should have), and then I get to spend some time in the well of self-hatred--I can't even finish what I started.

Well, no matter what I might be thinking, my thoughts are different from my actions. I'm going to keep up my training. It's going to be challenging because I'm heading to LA this weekend and making a quick trip to Illinois next week. I'll miss a spinning workout on Saturday, but will see how hard I can push myself in the hotel gym. I'll miss another spinning workout on Monday--I'll have to check my flight info to see if I can work out before I have to head to the airport. I moved my Monday Fitness Together workout to Tuesday. I'm going to see if I can fit in an extra spinning class on Wednesday.

I can see as I'm writing this that I'm contributing to being self-defeating by not looking at the workouts that I'll miss and getting new ones in my schedule. I'll do that before I go.

It Takes a Worried Man to Sing a Worried Song

I only have 7 more free sessions at Fitness Together, and I'm worried that I won't have accomplished enough. I want FT to be able to use my before and after story to show what great work they do, but I've only lost 8 pounds so far and no one has noticed a difference in my appearance. I had Liz take a picture of me to compare with the one she took when I started, and I actually think I looked better in the before picture.

I decided I was being crazy, so I put the pictures aside to look at when I was more rational, and guess what--I still thought I looked better in the before picture. Well, I've got 3 more weeks to have a better after picture. I brought my worry up to Mark when we trained together this morning, and he thought I was disappointed for myself, so he was reassuring me that I've made appropriate progress for the time I've been working out. I guess if Mark isn't concerned that I won't make a good story, I shouldn't be.

I'm very pleased with my progress. I would like it if my weight went down faster, but I feel great! I feel muscles where I didn't before, I can feel the fat disappearing like glaciers in global warming, I'm eating really great food and not having any trouble staying on the diet, and I'm loving the taste of food in a way I haven't. All that's good--stop worrying!

I had two great workouts today. I told Mark about the pain I was having in my ankle, so he had me do a lot of exercises that involved balancing on one leg and then the other. I would have thought that would have exarcerbated the problem, but it worked. Here are pictures from my two favorite exercises from today. I know, the first pictures look like I'm a person in the witness protection program demonstrating exercises while concealing my identity. Anyway, I would step onto a 1 foot high platform on one leg and then do presses. I did that about 40 times .

 

 








For the above exercise, I stood on one leg, holding onto a weighted cable, leaned forward until my leg was straight behind me, and then stood up and did a one-arm row, all without putting my foot down. I think I did 60 of these--4 sets of 15. Or was it 4 sets of 10. All I know is that I was really ready to stop at the end of each set--the sign of a good exercise.

Then tonight, I did spinning at the Y with Peggy. My ankle had been aching a bit, so I debated whether or not to go. I decided to err on the side of going, and if it hurt, I could always stop and come back home. I'm really glad I did, because I was able to make it though the whole hour. I didn't try to stay with Peggy--no jumps of standing for 8, sitting for 8, etc., but I stood a lot and tried to pick up my cadence both standing and sitting. I was able to get my heart rate into the 160s, and according to my heart rate monitor, burned 840 calories. I'm really pleased to have lasted the hour.

Best Laid Plans

Well, my plan of 3 workouts in 24 hours didn't work. After about 10 minutes of spinning yesterday morning, my left ankle started hurting. I rode for another 6 minutes at a slower pace, and not standing on the pedals, and then my ankle started hurting all the time, so I stopped.

My ankle had started hurting during spinning the night before, so for the last 10 minutes, I didn't stand on the pedals and it didn't hurt. The problem with the place my ankle hurts is that it's the place on the inside of my ankle that was operated on, so there are plates and pins under the skin there. Here's the scar:

 The pain could be caused by everything trying to adjust to all that hardware, which is something I've really been aware of on my left wrist when I do push-ups.  Here's my arm scar:

Another cause could be because the pin that goes between the two bones in my leg has broken. My doctor saw that on my last X-ray and said to let her know if it started hurting me.

Unfortunately, it is also the place where I've had chronic pain since I was 23. That summer, I biked back and forth from Northampton and Amherst everyday, using a bike that had a problem with the pedals, so it had a little hitch when I pushed down on the left pedal. I was at an age that it never occurred to me that that repetitive motion could cause a chronic injury.

I know from years of experience, when that chronic pain starts, I have to take it easy on my ankle, or it just gets worse. I've had regular pain in my left ankle since my surgery, but it's never turned into that chronic pain. But I know when I feel it, I have to pay attention, so I'm taking today off, too, so that hopefully I can work out at Fitness Together tomorrow morning and take Peggy's spinning class tomorrow evening. Wish me luck!

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/

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.