Two Piece Update

First off, I have to tell you, I am loving this Instagram thing. If you're following me then you already know, I'm going a little crazy with the picture posting. For those of you not familiar with Instagram, it's a photo-sharing website. A little like Facebook but instead of just following your friends (or vice versa) you can follow whoever suits your fancy (unless they have their page set to "private"). And then your "feed" is filled with pictures posted by the people you follow.

Here's a screenshot of my page to give you an idea of the pictures I'm posting. Mostly food and selfies but once I'm back at the exercise thing I'll start posting more pics of that too. And yes, that's a margarita.

So I have two pieces of news, no pun intended. The first is...I wore a bikini in public! This is not the first time (I did it once before), but it's the first time post-tummy tuck. What a difference! I still felt a little funny, in a I'm-not-quite-wearing-enough-clothes sort of way, but I got used to it as the day went on.

This was on Mother's Day. We stayed at my mom's the night before and had a lazy Sunday morning and her house. Then we went to the pool and met up with my mom-runner-friend Catherine and lounged there for most of the rest of the day. Don't get me started on all the food I ate. And we're not talking salads and carrot sticks either. But I'm going with the flow. I know once I get back to my regular exercise routine things will improve overall.

Which...brings me to the second piece of news...I went to the gym today. Yippee! I'm five weeks post-op today and while I have to wait one more week before I can start lifting weights, I'm clear to do anything else that feels good. So I started on the upright bike. I decided to just set the time/level to my old one, 25 minutes level 8, and go for it. I couldn't quite keep up my old pace but I lumbered through the whole 25 minutes and felt better for it.

After that I decided to do just a wee bit of strength training. Shh...I did a couple set of squats (no weights), some cable triceps stuff, bicep curls and one set of chest presses. Light weights, no pressure. Except that I tried to do a pushup. Bad idea. I got into position and that was fine but when I started to drop down, no bueno. Ok, so hold off on the pushups. But everything else was good. All-in-all I was there for about 40 minutes. The stress had been building, it was so good to sweat a little. Can't you tell by my post-workout smile?

I came home and decided that since I was in my gym clothes and it was really warm out, it would be fun to take the kids on a cruise around the neighborhood. They rode their bikes/scootered and I ran. Slow and easy with lots of starts and stops, but still running. My new shoes were comfy, though I wondered how they might be after several miles given how minimalist they are (not a whole lot of padding between my foot and the ground).

inov-8 runners. aren't they cute?!

It was fun to run, even under those circumstances. I'm looking forward to my first time back out there. And it will definitely be an "out there" run, not a treadmill one. I'll need to listen to my body and be able to make all those micro-pace adjustments you make when you're running outside. So I'd set the goal to exercise three times this week. One down, two to go. Easy peasey!