Sand, Water and Friends at Stinson Beach

I went to the gym yesterday and just knew I needed to run outside.  The treadmill is still quite tough for me mentally and the sun was still out so I did 3 miles outside.  Running felt like more of a challenge than I expected, I think it’s because I've shifted the focus to cycling and I’m no longer doing long runs on the weekends. The first mile I did in a little less than 12 minutes, the second was the same but by the third I felt like I wanted to push things some so I did it in a little less than 11 minutes.  I did 3 miles in 34 minutes and was happy with that.  I headed inside to do my strength training, chest/triceps/core.  I started with pushups, they were harder than they have been.  I checked my log and I haven’t done chest/triceps in a week so I think that’s why.  I tried one of the new Swiss ball exercises the trainer gave me, not sure if I will keep it.  And I added a new twist to my plank, I held the plank with arms straight for 20 seconds and then I lifted one leg for the remaining 20 seconds.  The next time I lifted the other leg.  It was a nice change and definitely a challenge.  I’d like to say I left the gym feeling great but I didn’t, I just felt glad it was over.  That’s just how it goes sometimes.


Today I am home with the kiddies, the funnest (pretty sure that’s not a word) but hardest day of the week.  A friend emailed last night about going to the beach and that sounded like a fabulous idea (Thanks Sara!).  So the minute we got up this morning I was working to get out the door in time to meet everyone to caravan the hour or so drive.  Boy did we have fun!  Well, most of the day.  We had a big wave scare the crap out of all three of us.  I was holding Myra and watching Marek play in the waves as they washed up on the beach.  Marek got knocked down and was flailing so I set Myra down on the beach to go help him.  Well, the wave was big enough that it reached where I left her and when I turned around to bring Marek out of the water I see Myra on her back with the wave rolling past her.  Fortunately she was on her back and it wasn't deep enough to cover her face but she was terrified!  I’ve got Marek in my arms and I’m running back to get her.  It was a scary moment for all of us.  Afterward Myra would not let me put her down, she’s never held me so tight, but she did after about 30-45 minutes. And later she let me walk her back to the water so that's a good sign. I was worried she'd be traumatized for life but she’s a trooper.

I know my children are having a different life than the one they would be living if I never started this journey.  Instead of Wednesdays being a fun-filled day of activity they’d probably be TV Wednesdays while I sat around being too tired to move.  I was that out of shape before.  I am so happy for me that I get to be the mother I want to be, that I have the desire and the energy to get them out the door and having fun.  I can build sand castles and chase them in the waves all day long.
Ok, back to today.  It’s a day off from the gym, unless I can go tonight when the kids go to bed.  I hope I can because otherwise I have to go Thur, Fri, Sat and I’d have to take Sunday off (because my body doesn’t like going four days in a row).  I’d rather go Sat and Sun, weekend gym visits are easier than hurried weekday ones.  If I go today I can take Thur or Fri off and exercise Sat and Sun.  But Miguel has a busy weekend so I’ll be mostly on my own, so maybe it won’t work.  Gym planning is never easy with this life of mine.

The Clouds Roll In

Ups and downs, that's what this journey is about.  It's never all sunshine and weight loss.  Sometimes it's clouds and weight gain.  The point is to tread water while the clouds are out so you're ready to go when the sun starts shining again.  I had a great weekend, action packed and fun.  But the clouds rolled in yesterday afternoon.  In the morning we took the kids out for some fun, going to a park where there's a lagoon and lots of ducks to feed.  We were there for hours and had a blast.  I climbed, ran, lifted, pushed, jumped.  With my kids there's no sitting on a bench reading a book.  Maybe some day that will happen but for now they still require 100% involvement from mom and dad.  It was a lot of fun.

Back at home we put the kids down for a nap and I was thinking I'd go to the gym.  Wrong.  I was exhausted!  I felt super tired.  So tired I wondered if I was getting sick or had bone cancer (yes, I'm a little dramatic at times).  I decided to skip the gym and plotted out a new plan for the week.  Sun = bike ride, Mon = day off, Tue = gym, Wed = day off, Thur/Fri/Sat = gym.  That will hit the target of five days of exercise.  It's nice when these unplanned gym-off days come early in the week so I can change the plan to still meet my goal. 

Before I close, a quick word about weight.  This past week I was back up to 174.2 pounds.  Ouch.  That's where I was a month ago.  And I don't have my period to blame.  It's no mystery, I've been eating too much.  I've been acting like I can eat whatever I want and we all know that's not true.  And I suspect that might have something to do with feeling drained and sick-ish yesterday too.  The body doesn't run so well on junk.  So I'm thinking about joining Weight Watchers and doing the online-only program just to help with the eating.  I won't have to fit meetings into my schedule and hopefully I can handle the tracking.  I'm going to mull this over for a day or so because I don't want to sign up ($$) and then not do it. 

So, hopefully getting to the gym today will clear the clouds and get my energy level back up.  That's it from me.  Happy Tuesday!!

Fitbie Fame and 30 Miles on the Road

I'll try to make this brief, but I'm not making any promises.  First up is some fun news.  I'M FAMOUS! Well, not quite (thank goodness), but my blog is currently being featured on msn's fitness site, fitbie.com, in their 10 Weight Loss Bloggers You Should Follow article.  I received an email from them a little while back asking if I'd agree to an interview.  Me?  Of course I was totally shocked.  You'd have thought I'd won an Oscar.   Blogging is a typically thankless job which is no matter because I do it mostly for me and for the person I might motivate.  Motivating even one person would make it worth it.  But it's nice to be acknowledged and I always get that from the comments but to get it in such a public way, it's a cool little bit of recognition.  So, without further ado, here's a screenshot of me in all my famousness.

  
How awesome is that?  And the other nine blogs that are featured are so super cool, I am in good company to be sure.  Miguel took the picture that they used and asked how much he's going to get.  I said he could have 50% of my earnings - zero.  Being rich is overrated anyway.


So, back to our regularly scheduled program...yesterday was a day off from the gym but I had a little bug in my brain to do something fun.  Miguel went mountain biking in the morning so the afternoon while the kids were napping was up for grabs.  I rounded up a friend for an easy bike ride in the afternoon.  Perfect.  


We started out with a plan to ride to downtown and maybe have a glass of wine.  We started riding and quickly found ourselves doing a big loop around the outskirts of town before circling back to downtown.  We stopped at a Mexican restaurant and had a drink.  Lovely.  We rode home and when all was said and done it was 10 miles.  This is why I exercise.  To be able to hop on my bike and go on a little cruise around town is such a gift.  It was so fun, I saw some parts of town I didn't know existed and I had a good time chatting with my girlfriend.  While I'm getting more used to this new me Michelle, I still am surprised sometimes.  Like, my definition of fun is a 10 mile bike ride?  Hello, who am I?  Oh yes, I'm a fit, healthy woman who actually enjoys physical activity.  It wasn't one bit about exercise - I didn't even wear my heart monitor!  Or my Garmin.  Or my bike shoes.  Total. Leisure. Ride.  


In the evening Miguel and I went out on a date night while my mom watched the kids.  We had a very nice dinner in San Francisco and I ate everything.  Fried lobster appetizer, steak, potatoes au gratin, and a super yummy banana cream pie.  Other than the little bit of cucumber salad that garnished the appetizer there wasn't a vegetable in sight.  Oh, and two glasses of wine.  Yum!  We came home exhausted.  

This morning I had a 30 mile road ride on the calendar with Melissa.  The conditions for today's ride were SO much better than last week.  Sunny skies, almost no wind - perfect cycling weather.  We hit the road around 10am and had a great day riding and chatting.  The route was great, enough hills to keep things interesting, not to mention gorgeous scenery riding along the bay.  I had some soreness in my left shoulder and my left butt bone (what do you call that bone in your butt?) was hurting me for about 1/2 the ride.  I don't know what's up with that because my right side is fine.  Anyway, it only really bugged me for the middle portion of the ride.  I hope it's ok for the Cinderella ride.  Speaking of that, Melissa tells me I have to at least wear a tiara.  Here's the info from my Garmin on today's ride:






31 miles, 2 hours, 45 minutes of riding time, average 10.1 miles per hour.  I'm happy with that.  And the very good news is that at the end I felt like I could do it again.  Last week's ride left me totally wiped out but today's was much better.  And Melissa said our ride today is more what the Cinderella will be like so that's good.  Now all we need is good weather (we already agreed to bag it if it's raining).  Average temps on that date are 67 degrees so hopefully we'll be fine.  (update: no, we weren't fine but no, we didn't bag it.  Read all about it here.)

Well, that's it from me!  In a few minutes I'm heading to a friend's house for a girls night and tomorrow is a family day.  Still don't know what we're doing but I'm sure it will be fun!  Whew, I'm ready for a nap! 

Justifying my Exercise and Swiss Ball Overload

It's Friday again, the weeks just keep rolling by.  The pace of life has really picked up.  Adding an exercise and training routine back into my life hasn't been easy, I am more go, go go than I used to be.  But I know it's important, I enjoy it, and it certainly is healthy.  And it's not only healthy for me, I know it's also about being a healthy family.  Miguel started back to the gym a few months ago.  He was never terribly out of shape but he'd gained a bit of weight and wasn't happy with how he looked.  A month or so after he started I overheard him talking with a friend of ours and she'd asked him, "What is inspiring you to do this?" and he said, "Michelle.  Michelle is inspiring me."  That was really cool.  A nice validation that what I'm doing matters to my family and to my children.  And it will matter more and more as they grow older.

Last week I was chatting with my mom and she asked if I was leaving the kids too much to go exercise, "you know they'll only be young like this for a short time."  As much as I feel I'm doing the right thing it's still hard to hear comments like this.  I know she means well, I know she doesn't value the exercise as much as I do, she doesn't get how it's tied in with my happiness - she's thinking about the kids.  As do I, but I know if I don't take good care of me I can't take good care of them.  I suppose in an ideal world I'd work 2-3 days a week for 4-hour workdays.  But that's not my world so I have to make do.

Let me write a bit about the payoff.  On my day home with the kids this past week, Wednesday, we played outside for hours.  I kicked the ball around with Marek, we all played a chasing game (it's very complicated, I chase them, they laugh, run, fall down, and then have me chase them some more), I wore those kids out.  Before I started exercising again I might not have played like that.  Never mind that I maybe didn't have the stamina for it, I wouldn't have wanted to do it.  I would have felt too tired to even start.  Not now.  Now I can run, jump, toss, climb, tumble - I can keep up and I enjoy it.

Thursday was back to the gym.  I started with a run on the treadmill.  I did 2 miles at a comfortable pace with 1% incline and debated doing a 3rd mile, but in the end I went for it and pushed to 6mph but lowered the incline to 0.  I was able to run that 3rd mile at a 10mm pace!  Of course I was a hot mess when I finished but it was a good kind of hot and a good kind of mess.  Then I got going on weight training with back/biceps/core work.  I ran out of time and had to drop my last set of bicep curls with the bar.  

Today was another gym day but a bit more exciting because I had a training session.  I bought a package of four sessions and have been using them slowly (as in, my last session was in December).  I use the sessions for getting feedback on my form and learning new exercises than I do for actual exercise.  I got to the gym early and did 15 minutes on the bike (normally I do 25 minutes but I didn't get there early enough).  We did a lot of new core stuff, mostly with the Swiss Ball (which I always just called a stability ball, who knew it was Swiss?).

First up was the Supine Hip Extension on the Swiss Ball:

I liked this one.  You raise your butt off the ground, hold for 5 seconds, then lower it.  The trainer said it's to strengthen my core and to try and not use my legs so much, to relax them.  Your legs naturally want to engage to keep the ball from rolling all around.  This will take some practice.  But I just looked up this exercise online and what I found says it works your glutes and your hamstrings.  So maybe I should just let my legs do the work after all. 

Next up the Alternating Superman on the Swiss Ball

This is one of those, it looks a lot easier than it is deals.  Lift one arm and the opposite leg and hold for 5 seconds.  Repeat on the other side.  By the second set I was able to do them pretty well but it's still a challenge.

Reverse Bridge Straight Leg Raise:

This is another one where I find online it say it's for your quads and the trainer said it's for the core.  I mean, I'm sure the core plays an integral role in all of these balance oriented exercises but it makes more sense that the main focus is the quads.

Back extension:

The thing about this is he had me doing them with weights.  I couldn't find any images of people doing them with weights.  And he had me lifting my upper body way higher than this woman.  We'll see how I feel and if I start to have back pain I'm dropping these.

Swiss roll:

You roll forward and push the ball away while the arms and legs move at the same time as each other. Knees stay fixed. Hold for a second then roll back.  It felt like I was working my diaphragm, which was weird.


I couldn't find one picture of the last exercise so I tried to draw a picture.  As you can see, I suck at drawing.

So you're lying on the floor on your stomach, you lift your arms just enough to do the shoulder presses.  These might have been my favorite.

The only other things we did were some squats and some shoulder presses with the medicine ball.  I need to do some thinking and see which of these Swiss Ball deals I want to keep, and how to incorporate them into my routine.  I don't think I'll be keeping them all.

When all was said and done with the trainer I felt compelled to get my total cardio time up to 25 minutes so I hopped on the treadmill and whipped up a mile in 10:25.  I can live with that.  I left the gym feeling spiffy.

This weekend is jam-packed, as seems to be the case these days.  But the splendid thing is it's a holiday so we get an extra day to fit it all in.  Tomorrow Miguel is going on a mountain bike ride and I'll be enjoying playgroup with the kids.  The afternoon is up for grabs since it's a day off from the gym.  Sunday is a long ride.  I've been researching routes and I think I've found one I like.  I'll have to post that later, this post is already too long.  And Monday we are saving for a family day.  Don't know what we'll do yet but I do know we'll spend the whole day together, which sounds great.  And hopefully I can get to the gym while the kids nap and they'll never know I was gone.  The best kind of mommy guilt is no guilt at all.  Wait, that doesn't make sense.

Moving Forward Stronger and Smarter

I found myself thinking about my eating adventures for a couple days and I soon realized it wasn't the actual food that bothered me, it was the way I ate the food that bothered me.  If Miguel and I had stopped at Jack in the Box for dinner and I had two tacos and onion rings - admittedly I wouldn't think of this as a good choice - but I wouldn't be upset about it.  And then later I got some ice cream and ate almost the whole pint.  Again, I know I wouldn't be slapping myself on the back with pride, but I don't think I'd have mental anguish that kept me up blogging until the wee hours of the morning.  It was because the behavior was compulsive, because I was alone and because it wasn't part of a normal day.  Thank you for listening, I just wanted to get that off my chest.  The good thing is I'm over it and am ready to move on.

Sunday was the big bike ride.  I mapped out a loop from home to the next town over and back around to home.  There were three hills to speak of and a fair amount of low level climbing.  Here's a map and elevation profile:

From the start the most challenging thing was the wind.  It was blowing directly in our faces and was probably the worst I'd ever experienced on this route.  About 6 miles in a man yelled as he passed me, "It's brutal out here today!".  That was nice confirmation that yes, the wind was brutal.  When we finally got to the hill, a hill I have fought with in the past (and eventually conquered), I wondered how it would go.  I just kept pedaling, slowly, pedaling, don't stop - and I made it!  And Melissa was right behind me, plugging along too.  She said seeing me pedaling in front of her made her keep going and not get off and walk.  Cool!

When we finally made a left we hoped the wind would be over with but no, it kept at us but from a slight right angle instead of head-on.  You know how when you're driving your car on a windy day and you feel the air move it around?  I felt that for the first time on my bike.  That's a bit nerve-wracking.  We got to the first really steep downhill and finally some wheeeeeee action!

Then we made another left at about mile 15 and started back in with the climbing but thankfully, no wind.  I had been eating my shot bloks pretty regular and felt pretty good.  We trudged along until we finally made it to the top of Big Rock, and wheeeeeeeee down Lucas Valley Road.  Nice.  My legs started burning around mile 27 but then got better, and started burning again around mile 31, when it started raining on us, but I was so close to home I didn't care.  All told, according to my gps, the ride was 34.5 miles.  And the Cinderella is 66?  Oh boy, this should be interesting.

We came home and stretched and felt like rock stars.  Like tired rock stars, that is.  I felt so good riding this route again since having kids.  I rode stronger, and smarter - not to mention happier, than the last time I rode it.  Granted, the last time included a trip to Point Reyes and was 50 miles but who's counting?

That night I was asleep by 9pm.  And Monday morning I slept in late.  I think I needed that after Saturday night.  I hit the gym Monday after work and ran two miles on the treadmill followed by chest/triceps/core work for strength training.  Love my pushups!   That night though (last night) I paid for my sleeping in and stayed up WAY TOO LATE, until nearly 1am.  Ugh.

I woke up this morning wishing for more sleep but I got up and moving.  I went through my day dragging and about an hour after lunch I started feeling nauseous and foggy.  My schedule was clear so I decided to take the rest of the day off sick.  I still dragged myself to the gym, fearful that I am getting sick and this might be my last chance for a few days.  I got on the bike for my normal 25 minutes but bagged it after 20 minutes.  Then I did legs/shoulders/core work and started feeling a bit better.  After strength training I decided to run 5 minutes on the treadmill to bring my cardio up to the full 25 minutes I normally do - you know I'm stubborn that way.  I hopped on and quickly upped the pace to 10 minute miles/6mph.  Whew!  That was a challenge but I ran for 5 minutes, a half-mile, at 6mph, after doing my legs routine.

I got off the treadmill feeling strong and alive, though still a bit nauseous.  Ah well, got some good stretching in and came home.  Now I'm hoping I'm not getting sick and that maybe it's just something I ate.  One thing's for sure, I'll keep you posted.