Yep. It's kind of a sad day, but its also kind of not. It's time to retire the old blog. It stopped really fitting what was going on for me, so rather than trying to force it, I've decided to just shut it down and move on.
to my new blog. http://mmmkoolaid.blogspot.com/
It's going to be very different than this blog is, because over the last year I have started to fundamentally change my thoughts and feelings about getting healthy and fit. I'm transitioning away from thinking about running and racing and over into more holistic, integrated ideas of health and wellness. And talking about that on a racing blog just didnt seem to fit.
This blog really helped me change my life. It chronicles the first chapter in a journey I never knew I would take back in the first post. It started as nothing more than a single place that my friends and family could go to to make sure that I was still doing ok through a rough patch and could see that I was using that to start something good and new. The first chapter had a lot of ups and downs, injuries and successes, people coming and going. Starting this blog and chronicling that transformation kept me honest, it kept me motivated, it kept me sane. Chapter 2 is no different. Just as cracked out as ever, just in a few more different avenues.
So... feel free to join me on my new blog:
http://mmmkoolaid.blogspot.com/
I probably won't post there as long nor as prolifically as I did over here, but then again, you never know. I don't think I could have predicted this journey at all when I started.
Happy Friday.
JC
Friday, April 10, 2009
Monday, December 01, 2008
Bleh... Lactate Threshold Work Sucks
I hate it. It's a necessary evil, but I really hate it. The idea is to push yourself well into that upper limit of your heart rate so you can improve both your aerobic capacity (aka the VO2max) and improve your body's acid tolerance. Like I said, necessary evil in the world of sport, but it's rarely a pretty thing to do.
This weekend I ran a 6.6 mile loop in Brooklyn. It was a really good run, but it had a number of stops and starts in it as I was trying to hunt down a photo opportunity for my dear old Dad. The pace time got really wonky because of all of the hunting around, but I noticed something interesting just before mile 5... one of my favorite upbeat songs came on and I glanced down and caught sight of my speed on my GPS. 6:43/mile. Sometimes things like that pop up on the screen and its just a little hiccup due to weird interference with satellites, but it usually gets worked out when the data upload corrects things. I made a note of the time and definitely that I was running a lot faster than normal and would struggle to keep it up beyond this one song, but just kept going. I was having fun. When I came back home and uploaded all my data I found out it really wasn't off. Somewhere in the middle of this run I had dropped to a sub-7 pace. This was the fastest I had ever run in my entire life. Crazy. In the end, my overall pace worked out to a 9:40, which is ok and certainly improving from where it had been, but I could tell that my limiting factor was just my cardio system not used to running this fast. My legs were feeling ready to do a lot more. And this told me I needed to get a little more focused on catching my cardio back up to where it ought to be. And that means LT training.
Sunday was my Crossfit day. Coincidentally we did a "metcon" WOD (are you starting to learn the lingo yet? WOD = workout of the day). Metcon stands for metabolic conditioning, so basically its similar to LT work in that you go all out and see what you can do in hopes of improving your overall ability to do crazy aerobic workouts. The metcon workout we were doing was called a Tabata, which is named for a Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata who came up with this craziness. Basically it's a way that you can, in parallel, train both your aerobic and anaerobic pathways concurrently, which until his break-through in 1996 was considered something that had to be trained independently. So a Tabata interval can be applied to any number of different exercises, but it is administered the same way. It runs like this: In 20 seconds do as many reps as you can of an exercise. Rest 10 seconds. Repeat this 20/10 cycle for a total of 8 times. It's an all-out kinda gig that lasts 4 minutes. But it's an very intense 4 minutes of everything you got. But this is Crossfit. So its not like its going to stop there. No no my friends.
Our WOD was called the "Tabata Something Else." Weird name, I know. It runs like this: Pull Up Tabata, Push Up Tabata, Sit Up Tabata, Squat Tabata. So string the 8 x 20 seconds all out/ 10 seconds rest all together for a solid 16 minutes of hell on earth and you have Tabata Something Else. Starting out with pull-ups was killer. I knew it was going to be killer so I dropped to the green band resistance and tried to kip as many of the pull-ups as I could, but the truth is that much that fast was killing my forearms most of all. I have small hands and was apparently on the larger pull up bar, so that didn't help. In the end, I got 48 pull-ups in the 8 segments of 20 seconds. That needs some work. Over to push-ups. I got 66. Those were pretty painful too, but not nearly so much. On to sit-ups and I got another 66. I could have gotten more but I didn't get over to my station in enough time, which sucks, so that will improve next time for sure. Squats were my best of the bunch. I got 96 in. I managed to get better with almost each round, so my last round was my best. I think a lot of that was my hamstrings being tight at the beginning but as we went on it got a little easier to pick it up. So with that I was pretty pleased.
So let's get to today's run, shall we? I knew I was going to push myself pretty hard this time. My goal was to average sub-9. In general, I run faster in the morning, but my morning got usurped by work drama, so I wound up running in the middle of the day. Challenge #1-- this was going to make my heart rate naturally higher anyway. Challenge #2, I overdressed. It wound up being in the 50s and sunny and while I knew that before heading out, it didn't translate as well as it could to my clothing. So I was running hot. My goal was 3 and change, so I was keeping it short, but I wanted it fast and hard. And boy did I get it. Up until just after the completion of mile 2, I was averaging an 8:52, but at that point it all kind of fell apart. My heart rate was averaging not just high but very high and suddenly I hit a number I didn't think I could. Until today I thought my max heart rate was 185. All the testing I had done put it right about there and the hardest runs I had done maxed out around 179, so I was feeling like this was a pretty good guess. Max heart rate is a static number. It doesn't change. The Lactate Threshold changes as you get more fit so you can run harder and closer to that max number without falling apart, but max stays consistent. Your heart can only beat so hard and this magic number is unique to individuals. So when I got home I found my heart rate had maxed at 187. Which means that my true max is probably even a little higher since I am pretty sure I didn't hit my breaking point today, but it explains why it all fell apart at that point. I carried on to 3.6 but it was much more of a struggle after that, so I stopped and walked a little bit to catch my breath. Final result was again a 9:40, but overall I am ok with that.
It's definitely taking me some work to get my speed back, but even averaging that right now is perfectly ok with me. If that's all I get out of this, I can live with that. But I have a sense I might be able to go a little bit faster, so we'll keep trying. This week is going to get a little crazy busy with work, so I am not sure whats going to happen with the usual schedule. Here's hoping I can hold it all together and be good to go, but it'll play out as it does, right?
So yeah, that's whats going on. Happy to be back in my cave post Thanksgiving. While it was fun to see my family, my innards weren't too happy to come out of the cave. I kinda felt like crap for a few days afterwards and I think its just because I haven't eaten bread or dairy products in a while now, so it really messed me up again. Yea for Paleo feeling normal now. I *heart* my cave.
More later.
This weekend I ran a 6.6 mile loop in Brooklyn. It was a really good run, but it had a number of stops and starts in it as I was trying to hunt down a photo opportunity for my dear old Dad. The pace time got really wonky because of all of the hunting around, but I noticed something interesting just before mile 5... one of my favorite upbeat songs came on and I glanced down and caught sight of my speed on my GPS. 6:43/mile. Sometimes things like that pop up on the screen and its just a little hiccup due to weird interference with satellites, but it usually gets worked out when the data upload corrects things. I made a note of the time and definitely that I was running a lot faster than normal and would struggle to keep it up beyond this one song, but just kept going. I was having fun. When I came back home and uploaded all my data I found out it really wasn't off. Somewhere in the middle of this run I had dropped to a sub-7 pace. This was the fastest I had ever run in my entire life. Crazy. In the end, my overall pace worked out to a 9:40, which is ok and certainly improving from where it had been, but I could tell that my limiting factor was just my cardio system not used to running this fast. My legs were feeling ready to do a lot more. And this told me I needed to get a little more focused on catching my cardio back up to where it ought to be. And that means LT training.
Sunday was my Crossfit day. Coincidentally we did a "metcon" WOD (are you starting to learn the lingo yet? WOD = workout of the day). Metcon stands for metabolic conditioning, so basically its similar to LT work in that you go all out and see what you can do in hopes of improving your overall ability to do crazy aerobic workouts. The metcon workout we were doing was called a Tabata, which is named for a Japanese researcher Izumi Tabata who came up with this craziness. Basically it's a way that you can, in parallel, train both your aerobic and anaerobic pathways concurrently, which until his break-through in 1996 was considered something that had to be trained independently. So a Tabata interval can be applied to any number of different exercises, but it is administered the same way. It runs like this: In 20 seconds do as many reps as you can of an exercise. Rest 10 seconds. Repeat this 20/10 cycle for a total of 8 times. It's an all-out kinda gig that lasts 4 minutes. But it's an very intense 4 minutes of everything you got. But this is Crossfit. So its not like its going to stop there. No no my friends.
Our WOD was called the "Tabata Something Else." Weird name, I know. It runs like this: Pull Up Tabata, Push Up Tabata, Sit Up Tabata, Squat Tabata. So string the 8 x 20 seconds all out/ 10 seconds rest all together for a solid 16 minutes of hell on earth and you have Tabata Something Else. Starting out with pull-ups was killer. I knew it was going to be killer so I dropped to the green band resistance and tried to kip as many of the pull-ups as I could, but the truth is that much that fast was killing my forearms most of all. I have small hands and was apparently on the larger pull up bar, so that didn't help. In the end, I got 48 pull-ups in the 8 segments of 20 seconds. That needs some work. Over to push-ups. I got 66. Those were pretty painful too, but not nearly so much. On to sit-ups and I got another 66. I could have gotten more but I didn't get over to my station in enough time, which sucks, so that will improve next time for sure. Squats were my best of the bunch. I got 96 in. I managed to get better with almost each round, so my last round was my best. I think a lot of that was my hamstrings being tight at the beginning but as we went on it got a little easier to pick it up. So with that I was pretty pleased.
So let's get to today's run, shall we? I knew I was going to push myself pretty hard this time. My goal was to average sub-9. In general, I run faster in the morning, but my morning got usurped by work drama, so I wound up running in the middle of the day. Challenge #1-- this was going to make my heart rate naturally higher anyway. Challenge #2, I overdressed. It wound up being in the 50s and sunny and while I knew that before heading out, it didn't translate as well as it could to my clothing. So I was running hot. My goal was 3 and change, so I was keeping it short, but I wanted it fast and hard. And boy did I get it. Up until just after the completion of mile 2, I was averaging an 8:52, but at that point it all kind of fell apart. My heart rate was averaging not just high but very high and suddenly I hit a number I didn't think I could. Until today I thought my max heart rate was 185. All the testing I had done put it right about there and the hardest runs I had done maxed out around 179, so I was feeling like this was a pretty good guess. Max heart rate is a static number. It doesn't change. The Lactate Threshold changes as you get more fit so you can run harder and closer to that max number without falling apart, but max stays consistent. Your heart can only beat so hard and this magic number is unique to individuals. So when I got home I found my heart rate had maxed at 187. Which means that my true max is probably even a little higher since I am pretty sure I didn't hit my breaking point today, but it explains why it all fell apart at that point. I carried on to 3.6 but it was much more of a struggle after that, so I stopped and walked a little bit to catch my breath. Final result was again a 9:40, but overall I am ok with that.
It's definitely taking me some work to get my speed back, but even averaging that right now is perfectly ok with me. If that's all I get out of this, I can live with that. But I have a sense I might be able to go a little bit faster, so we'll keep trying. This week is going to get a little crazy busy with work, so I am not sure whats going to happen with the usual schedule. Here's hoping I can hold it all together and be good to go, but it'll play out as it does, right?
So yeah, that's whats going on. Happy to be back in my cave post Thanksgiving. While it was fun to see my family, my innards weren't too happy to come out of the cave. I kinda felt like crap for a few days afterwards and I think its just because I haven't eaten bread or dairy products in a while now, so it really messed me up again. Yea for Paleo feeling normal now. I *heart* my cave.
More later.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
Fitness Idiocy of the Week
Cause I am sure I can make this into a weekly thing if I want to. We'll see how inspired I can get. But this one bared mentioning.
This is not a joke. It is the brain child of a former Olympian named Alex Astelian (you can read his bio on his website: http://www.speedfit.com/). This gigantic piece of machinery is nothing more than a treadmill that moves at 3x the speed of walking. Now you can take your treadmilling outdoors and run errands while working out. Hmm. Isn't that called RUNNING? And doesn't it cost a whole lot less than running with this piece of crap?? Seriously?? Oh, and Alex... nice work on the accompanying music. I feel like I am ready for an episode of The Greatest American Hero to start.
I mean, who in their right mind is going to throw down even the strict cost of parts to build this thing, nevermind find a way to get this into their garage or worse, apartment, in the first place?
The guy is apparently looking for venture capital to get this thing off the ground (hahahaha). So hey, maybe you'll know someone who thinks it is as genius as Alex does. In the meantime, I think I'll stick to my sneakers and the pavement.
This is not a joke. It is the brain child of a former Olympian named Alex Astelian (you can read his bio on his website: http://www.speedfit.com/). This gigantic piece of machinery is nothing more than a treadmill that moves at 3x the speed of walking. Now you can take your treadmilling outdoors and run errands while working out. Hmm. Isn't that called RUNNING? And doesn't it cost a whole lot less than running with this piece of crap?? Seriously?? Oh, and Alex... nice work on the accompanying music. I feel like I am ready for an episode of The Greatest American Hero to start.
I mean, who in their right mind is going to throw down even the strict cost of parts to build this thing, nevermind find a way to get this into their garage or worse, apartment, in the first place?
The guy is apparently looking for venture capital to get this thing off the ground (hahahaha). So hey, maybe you'll know someone who thinks it is as genius as Alex does. In the meantime, I think I'll stick to my sneakers and the pavement.
Thursday, November 20, 2008
Now That Was A Bear!
I had crossfit again last night. I moved my week around a little bit again. And I'll be honest, I was stoked for this workout long before I walked in the door.
Couple of reasons why. First-- day 3 of paleo finally turned a corner. Dare I say, I actually felt fit for human consumption once again. While I still felt that weirdness at 1pm, it wasn't bad at all and I could just sort of ignore it and move on. By mid-day I had, literally, nailed my calorie intake and ratios. I was spot on. By the end of the day, I had kept it along the same lines... straight down the middle, hitting each of the new percentages fairly on the mark, and more importantly, within each meal itself. That's really the big challenge-- striking the balance at the meal-level, not just in the overall day. If I can balance each meal it regulates the components of each-- so adding protein to carbs slows down the burn of the carb.
Timing the protein to not just the carb but also to timing of exercise and recovery creates something called "calorie partitioning." In essence calorie partitioning is timing intake to correspond to muscle damage. And remember that muscle damage is part of muscle growth, right? Every workout basically stresses and tears muscle fiber and then the body gets to work on rebuilding itself. This is why after a hard workout muscles swell a little and people think that they are already buffer from the workout one hour later. The swell is the body's healing response. The idea of calorie partitioning is that if I can introduce more calories and the right kinds of calories at that point, I can direct them towards the muscle damage which in turn will help repair and strengthen the muscle.
So my goal for going to Crossfit, and already knowing what I was in for, was to have my caloric base solid and well spread out, but I knew I would want a larger chunk of my calories to be spent after the workout, as close to the end of the workout as possible, and more heavily weighted to the carb and protein side. I'd have some fat to make up after, but that wouldn't be an issue if I planned it well.
I walked into the door of Crossfit at solidly 60% of my calorie intake with the spread perfect. Hot. I was getting the hang of this.
So Crossfit. The workout of the day was called The Bear. It ran with the following instructions:
"7 sets of the sequence:
Power Clean
Front Squat
Push Press
Back Squat
Push Press
5 Rounds
Rest between rounds as needed."
And it included a movie. Yep. Now I can't embed it here for technical reasons, but I can give you a link to it. The Bear. I highly encourage you to watch it. With the sound up... cause the music with it is rockin. It is, simply put (sorry Mom), workout porn. This workout is hot. As you watch the woman in the front, you'll see what I mean.
So when it came time to doing it, I knew that I needed to be mindful of the weight because the newness of so many of these movements. At this point, the worst thing I can do is compromise the form and wind up hurting myself. So I went in knowing I was going to be conservative with the weight and just try and dial in the form. The good thing about this approach is that there are a lot of trainers there to help dial it in with you. Taking what they say and trying to feel through it is hard and there's a lot to pay attention to, so I took it slow and lighter and just kind of ran with it. I wound up getting my 5 rounds in at 35lbs/ 35lbs/ 40lbs/ 45lbs/ 45lbs. At 45lbs I started to struggle with the power clean. I had struggled with the squats all the way through because its supposed to be back over your heels and the strength of my quads wants the lift to come from there, but then it puts me into a forward pitch, which is bad with heavier weights. If I can retrain myself to be over my heels, the weight is in a straight line with me and I don't worry about tipping in any direction. I came away with these two areas as my biggest work points. I need to nail the power clean better and I need to fix my foot placement for the squats. Thankfully, I had quite a bit of advice and help throughout this workout. End result, it was hard. But I LOVED IT. The Bear has been my favorite WOD (Workout of the Day) to date.
From there, because it was one of the trainers birthdays, I hung out with him as he was teaching people "kipping pull ups." Kipping pull ups are totally different than standard pull ups. Instead of strictly pulling with your arms, kippings involve creating momentum through a swing to more efficiently bring yourself over the bar. Instead of aiming to get your chin over the bar, this finishes with your hands at chest level before pushing back and swinging back down into full extension well ahead of the bar and then pulling back. It's like being a swing. I've watched people do this before, but it looks hard, honestly. There's a lot that is going on and its a coordination of a lot of stuff. So, truthfully, I've avoided trying it. Not last night. I started out with the blue band for resistance. Its the same one I have at home and the one that I use for my standard pull-ups. I got a leg in and locked off and played with it for a while. And eventually the movement clicked and off I went. After a few, we stepped me down to the tan band which is the lightest of the bands. Again, off I went, and while it was a little harder, it still felt solid. And it was fun! So with some reluctance, we took the tan band away and let me try it on my own. Close, but no cigar. Truth is, my shoulders were pretty freaking tired from The Bear and now all these other kippings, that I don't think it was my best bet. Maybe fresh I could hit one or two without the band. I will have to try it on Sunday.
In between kippings, I just watched the L2 class after us do the same workout. I love watching this kind of thing. I love seeing people really dialed in. I love seeing the clean movement, the tight form and the strength all together. It's transfixing, honestly. There is one woman I watch more than most. She's got that attention to detail that looks effortless now, but I am sure took her a long time to find. She was helping me on my form yesterday alot, so watching her do it with all the details she had given me was cool. Truth is, this workout just looks incredible. Especially when you have a room full of people doing it.
In the end, it was really cold out and I didn't want to start my cool down until I was ready to get some food into me, so I opted to run home. I was a little overdressed for the run, but that was ok. It would keep my heart rate up and just be a good finish to the night. It was just 2 miles, so it was easy, even with the backpack and the excessive layers. And I love running over some of the old school paving stones in Park Slope. I got home and had some dinner. Lots of protein and carbs. Salmon and more of the butternut squash I had made. And to top it all off I had some nuts to make sure I got some fat in me.
End result-- check me out... right on the mark, baby!
Not too shabby.
Love from the cave,
JC
Couple of reasons why. First-- day 3 of paleo finally turned a corner. Dare I say, I actually felt fit for human consumption once again. While I still felt that weirdness at 1pm, it wasn't bad at all and I could just sort of ignore it and move on. By mid-day I had, literally, nailed my calorie intake and ratios. I was spot on. By the end of the day, I had kept it along the same lines... straight down the middle, hitting each of the new percentages fairly on the mark, and more importantly, within each meal itself. That's really the big challenge-- striking the balance at the meal-level, not just in the overall day. If I can balance each meal it regulates the components of each-- so adding protein to carbs slows down the burn of the carb.
Timing the protein to not just the carb but also to timing of exercise and recovery creates something called "calorie partitioning." In essence calorie partitioning is timing intake to correspond to muscle damage. And remember that muscle damage is part of muscle growth, right? Every workout basically stresses and tears muscle fiber and then the body gets to work on rebuilding itself. This is why after a hard workout muscles swell a little and people think that they are already buffer from the workout one hour later. The swell is the body's healing response. The idea of calorie partitioning is that if I can introduce more calories and the right kinds of calories at that point, I can direct them towards the muscle damage which in turn will help repair and strengthen the muscle.
So my goal for going to Crossfit, and already knowing what I was in for, was to have my caloric base solid and well spread out, but I knew I would want a larger chunk of my calories to be spent after the workout, as close to the end of the workout as possible, and more heavily weighted to the carb and protein side. I'd have some fat to make up after, but that wouldn't be an issue if I planned it well.
I walked into the door of Crossfit at solidly 60% of my calorie intake with the spread perfect. Hot. I was getting the hang of this.
So Crossfit. The workout of the day was called The Bear. It ran with the following instructions:
"7 sets of the sequence:
Power Clean
Front Squat
Push Press
Back Squat
Push Press
5 Rounds
Rest between rounds as needed."
And it included a movie. Yep. Now I can't embed it here for technical reasons, but I can give you a link to it. The Bear. I highly encourage you to watch it. With the sound up... cause the music with it is rockin. It is, simply put (sorry Mom), workout porn. This workout is hot. As you watch the woman in the front, you'll see what I mean.
So when it came time to doing it, I knew that I needed to be mindful of the weight because the newness of so many of these movements. At this point, the worst thing I can do is compromise the form and wind up hurting myself. So I went in knowing I was going to be conservative with the weight and just try and dial in the form. The good thing about this approach is that there are a lot of trainers there to help dial it in with you. Taking what they say and trying to feel through it is hard and there's a lot to pay attention to, so I took it slow and lighter and just kind of ran with it. I wound up getting my 5 rounds in at 35lbs/ 35lbs/ 40lbs/ 45lbs/ 45lbs. At 45lbs I started to struggle with the power clean. I had struggled with the squats all the way through because its supposed to be back over your heels and the strength of my quads wants the lift to come from there, but then it puts me into a forward pitch, which is bad with heavier weights. If I can retrain myself to be over my heels, the weight is in a straight line with me and I don't worry about tipping in any direction. I came away with these two areas as my biggest work points. I need to nail the power clean better and I need to fix my foot placement for the squats. Thankfully, I had quite a bit of advice and help throughout this workout. End result, it was hard. But I LOVED IT. The Bear has been my favorite WOD (Workout of the Day) to date.
From there, because it was one of the trainers birthdays, I hung out with him as he was teaching people "kipping pull ups." Kipping pull ups are totally different than standard pull ups. Instead of strictly pulling with your arms, kippings involve creating momentum through a swing to more efficiently bring yourself over the bar. Instead of aiming to get your chin over the bar, this finishes with your hands at chest level before pushing back and swinging back down into full extension well ahead of the bar and then pulling back. It's like being a swing. I've watched people do this before, but it looks hard, honestly. There's a lot that is going on and its a coordination of a lot of stuff. So, truthfully, I've avoided trying it. Not last night. I started out with the blue band for resistance. Its the same one I have at home and the one that I use for my standard pull-ups. I got a leg in and locked off and played with it for a while. And eventually the movement clicked and off I went. After a few, we stepped me down to the tan band which is the lightest of the bands. Again, off I went, and while it was a little harder, it still felt solid. And it was fun! So with some reluctance, we took the tan band away and let me try it on my own. Close, but no cigar. Truth is, my shoulders were pretty freaking tired from The Bear and now all these other kippings, that I don't think it was my best bet. Maybe fresh I could hit one or two without the band. I will have to try it on Sunday.
In between kippings, I just watched the L2 class after us do the same workout. I love watching this kind of thing. I love seeing people really dialed in. I love seeing the clean movement, the tight form and the strength all together. It's transfixing, honestly. There is one woman I watch more than most. She's got that attention to detail that looks effortless now, but I am sure took her a long time to find. She was helping me on my form yesterday alot, so watching her do it with all the details she had given me was cool. Truth is, this workout just looks incredible. Especially when you have a room full of people doing it.
In the end, it was really cold out and I didn't want to start my cool down until I was ready to get some food into me, so I opted to run home. I was a little overdressed for the run, but that was ok. It would keep my heart rate up and just be a good finish to the night. It was just 2 miles, so it was easy, even with the backpack and the excessive layers. And I love running over some of the old school paving stones in Park Slope. I got home and had some dinner. Lots of protein and carbs. Salmon and more of the butternut squash I had made. And to top it all off I had some nuts to make sure I got some fat in me.
End result-- check me out... right on the mark, baby!
Not too shabby.
Love from the cave,
JC
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
I Got Me A Baseline
I told you that before I set out on my crazy little cave person diet, I went to get my doctor's approval. I had her run my blood work too. So hopefully this will establish my baseline against which I can really see how good this diet really is.
With no further ado, I'm sharing it with you all so you can keep me on the hook for this.
Total Cholesterol: 166 mg/dL
HDL cholesterol: 57 mg/dL
LDL Cholesterol: 100 mg/dL
Triglycerides: 45 mg/dL
Blood Glucose: 78 mg/dL
Most importantly, my kidneys, liver and thyroid all tested normal and I am not anemic as of the start of all of this. The anemic thing has been no small feat, so given the timing of this, I think the anemia thing may also be related to starting to eat meat again.
I really wish I had gotten this done when I first climbed up off the couch. It's been interesting to watch the last 2 years of these numbers improving. You would never know looking at these numbers how profoundly sedentary the majority of my life has been. I wish there was a way to equally quantify the improvement in things like lung function since quitting smoking, too.
Seeing numbers like this remind me just how much I saved my own life some years ago when I climbed up off the couch and stubbed out my last cigarette. Now let's see what happens after going Paleo.
With no further ado, I'm sharing it with you all so you can keep me on the hook for this.
Total Cholesterol: 166 mg/dL
HDL cholesterol: 57 mg/dL
LDL Cholesterol: 100 mg/dL
Triglycerides: 45 mg/dL
Blood Glucose: 78 mg/dL
Most importantly, my kidneys, liver and thyroid all tested normal and I am not anemic as of the start of all of this. The anemic thing has been no small feat, so given the timing of this, I think the anemia thing may also be related to starting to eat meat again.
I really wish I had gotten this done when I first climbed up off the couch. It's been interesting to watch the last 2 years of these numbers improving. You would never know looking at these numbers how profoundly sedentary the majority of my life has been. I wish there was a way to equally quantify the improvement in things like lung function since quitting smoking, too.
Seeing numbers like this remind me just how much I saved my own life some years ago when I climbed up off the couch and stubbed out my last cigarette. Now let's see what happens after going Paleo.
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
Well Ain't This Interesting?!
I mentioned a few days ago that I was going to be trying my hand at the Paleo Diet. Well, I started it this week and let me tell you, this is turning into quite an adventure. I shall share. Cause I'm like that.
So let's start with the premise. And if you are reading along and you don't believe in evolution, this is totally the part where you hit the red X button. Tho it would be funny to have some non-evolution-believers reading a queer athletes blog. Hahaha. But I digress.
Theory is that humans evolved to eat a diet that is radically different than we do today. Back in the paleolithic period our cave-dwelling ancestors lived off of what they could hunt or gather. There was no agriculture, much less the industrial agriculture we've all been lulled into. While certainly people lived harsh lives and probably died early, they died of things like animal attacks, exposure to elements, getting run over by Flintstones cars and the like. In general, early humans show no evidence of the chronic diseases we are all dying from-- heart disease, cholesterol, diabetes, etc. They retained remarkably healthy physiques and are believed to have been far more immune to just the run of the mill ailments we all contend with. So this guy who appears to have trained as an ethnobiologist more than anything else, proposes this new way of eating in 2002... eating like a cave person.
Ok, so we all know that food can be broken into carbs, fat and protein, right? And calories too, but the key in this shift is more the percentages that comprise those calories. If as a modern person you follow the current convention advocated by groups like the FDA, you are eating along the following recommendation:
* 45% to 65% of calories eaten should come from carbohydrates.
* 20% to 35% of calories eaten should come from fat.
* 10% to 35% of calories eaten should come from protein.
If you are following you cave-dwelling fore-bearers, life looks a little more like this:
* 25-30% of calories eaten should come from carbohydrates.
* 40% of calories eaten should come from fat.
* 30% to 35% of calories eaten should come from protein.
Note the huge shift between carbs and protein? It's pretty dramatic. Then you look at definitions of things like carbs and fat. The traditional American diet tends towards very refined and enriched carbs (look at your labels. See the words "fortified" or "enriched?"). These tend to have a very high glycemic index-- which is basically the amount of sugar within the carb. A high number means its going to hit your blood stream a little harder and faster. Our cave-dwelling fore-bearers didn't have enriching facilities. The carbs they got were in vegetables and fruits.
There's a similar shift in fats. Basics of fat-- 3 types. Unsaturated, Saturated, Transfat. Ok, so unsaturated. This is the good stuff. This is the olive oil, the nuts, the fish. Saturated. This is where things get interesting. Typically saturated fats come from animal products-- dairy and meat. Interesting shift in modern agriculture is that animal products are now notorious for their saturated fat. Didn't used to be that way. Seems when we started tricking animals into not eating grass in favor of corn, they started getting more and more saturated fat in their content. To think that even now, "corn-fed beef" is considered an advertising slogan. Ack. Give cows grass and the saturated fat content goes way the heck down. Seriously. Lastly is transfat. This stuff is evil. It's actually now banned in some places like happy NYC. These are entirely man-made nightmare fats in things like margarine and, oh, everything, that include the words "hydrogenated." Yuck. Paleo fat is all focused on unsaturated, and at that its focused mainly on mono-unsaturated, which is the stuff that kicks up your good HDL cholesterol.
Have I lost you yet? (And to think I am not even getting into the weeds.)
Ok, so Paleo. Change around the ratios, change the types of fats and the types of carbs and kick up the protein and see what happens. Most people experience a few things when they follow this plan. First off, they get over the insulin-related highs and lows of the modern diet. No post-lunch sleepies. So energy gets a lot more regulated. Secondly, they get a lot more heart healthy and lean. These two things are big for me.
So as regimented as I am for my training, I am notoriously weak on the regimented nutrition. A few months ago when I gave up being vegetarian it was with a renewed interest in tackling that challenge. As my weight had started to come back down to something more close to my training and fighting weight, the nagging issue for me was body fat percentage. And it always has been. For someone as small as me, I have an exceptionally high body fat percentage. Because I don't eat well enough. So as of today I am 122 lbs with a 26.2% body fat. That's kinda crazy if you think about it. Here's what the American Council on Exercise publishes as general recommendations
Classification: Women (% fat) / Men (% fat)
Essential Fat: 10-12% / 2-4%
Athletes: 14-20% / 6-13%
Fitness: 21-24% / 14-17%
Acceptable: 25-31% / 18-25%
Obese: 32% plus / 25% plus
See what I mean? I am only in the acceptable range. Which if you think about the kind of stuff I am doing on a regular basis here is a little surprising. And this reads that its time to dial this in. So leaning me up a little is a good thing. Now I really don't want to lose more weight. I am kinda happy around 120. I can do 115. Anything below that is scary looking. So my goal is to add muscle while leaning up so it can offset it all and I don't have to look like Jack from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Cause that ain't hot, yo.
So now you have the back story. Let's talk about where this is. Today is technically day 2. More like 2.5 since I started at the Crossfit "Paleo Potluck" on Sunday, where a number of the other athletes who are already on this kick got together for some communal food and fun. They all started this on November 1, so they have about 2 weeks up on me. Just enough to let me know what is in store for me.
My first 2 days have been shockingly challenging. I don't get cravings, honestly. I don't hanker chocolate or sugar or salt or much of anything. So this isn't about craving. It's about withdrawal. Breaking the addiction to the standard American fare carb garbage is hard. My first day I was, admittedly, downright hostile. The thing with me, however, is that I am both appreciating the transition as being something biochemically fascinating, as I am engaged in the reaction. So I waffle between "Hey, this feels kinda funky. Isn't it cool??" and "OMG if that kid doesn't stop screaming I may break it's windpipe." It was the kind of day I could have gotten into a fist-fight and then thoroughly analyzed the biochemistry of rage thereafter. Not.good.
I also noticed I was profoundly winded. I don't get sick often but last winter I got that case of bronchitis, which was a first for me, and it was the same kind of winded. I went from running 7 miles last week to struggling up a flight of stairs. It was odd. Secondly, I noticed I was nauseous. Mostly in the afternoons. By 1 pm, I want to throw up. If I can just get over the mindset and make sure I am eating anyway, it seems to pass. But its strange. Lastly, and perhaps most strangely, my body temperature has dropped a little. I know my body well. I can tell from a mile away if I am about to get sick. It's how I avoid it. This temperature shift though has nothing to do with getting sick. At all. It's withdrawal. I can feel it.
My biggest challenge right now is hitting my ratios. Truth is that though I didn't eat so healthy, I could usually nail my percentages which I had previously modeled more on the Zone diet (40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fat). It's not a dramatic shift in percentage for me, its more in the types of each that makes it a little harder for me to work out. Here's what I am looking at after figuring in dinner for tonight:
I'm fine on the fat with the nuts and some olive oil and fish and all that, but both the protein and carb percentages are too low. I have 450 calories I haven't accounted for just to maintain my current weight. This is notoriously a problem for me... I am often under calories, but now that I am eating a lot more food just to hit calories, its getting even more challenging. While the shift in food types is something I need to physically acclimate to, the method of eating is a huge procedural change for me that I am very thrown by. To make up for some of the deficit tonight, I'm going to throw a butternut squash into the oven with some sage and see if I can't get some carbs into me. The protein... not entirely sure how to fix that right now. But its a little closer.
So day 2 paleo. I can summarize it best by saying that I am well outside my comfort zone. Phrases like "I need to throw a butternut squash into the oven" aren't typical for me. But hey... it's good to be outside my comfort zone once and a while, right?
This is long. I hit post now. More later, with love from the cave.
So let's start with the premise. And if you are reading along and you don't believe in evolution, this is totally the part where you hit the red X button. Tho it would be funny to have some non-evolution-believers reading a queer athletes blog. Hahaha. But I digress.
Theory is that humans evolved to eat a diet that is radically different than we do today. Back in the paleolithic period our cave-dwelling ancestors lived off of what they could hunt or gather. There was no agriculture, much less the industrial agriculture we've all been lulled into. While certainly people lived harsh lives and probably died early, they died of things like animal attacks, exposure to elements, getting run over by Flintstones cars and the like. In general, early humans show no evidence of the chronic diseases we are all dying from-- heart disease, cholesterol, diabetes, etc. They retained remarkably healthy physiques and are believed to have been far more immune to just the run of the mill ailments we all contend with. So this guy who appears to have trained as an ethnobiologist more than anything else, proposes this new way of eating in 2002... eating like a cave person.
Ok, so we all know that food can be broken into carbs, fat and protein, right? And calories too, but the key in this shift is more the percentages that comprise those calories. If as a modern person you follow the current convention advocated by groups like the FDA, you are eating along the following recommendation:
* 45% to 65% of calories eaten should come from carbohydrates.
* 20% to 35% of calories eaten should come from fat.
* 10% to 35% of calories eaten should come from protein.
If you are following you cave-dwelling fore-bearers, life looks a little more like this:
* 25-30% of calories eaten should come from carbohydrates.
* 40% of calories eaten should come from fat.
* 30% to 35% of calories eaten should come from protein.
Note the huge shift between carbs and protein? It's pretty dramatic. Then you look at definitions of things like carbs and fat. The traditional American diet tends towards very refined and enriched carbs (look at your labels. See the words "fortified" or "enriched?"). These tend to have a very high glycemic index-- which is basically the amount of sugar within the carb. A high number means its going to hit your blood stream a little harder and faster. Our cave-dwelling fore-bearers didn't have enriching facilities. The carbs they got were in vegetables and fruits.
There's a similar shift in fats. Basics of fat-- 3 types. Unsaturated, Saturated, Transfat. Ok, so unsaturated. This is the good stuff. This is the olive oil, the nuts, the fish. Saturated. This is where things get interesting. Typically saturated fats come from animal products-- dairy and meat. Interesting shift in modern agriculture is that animal products are now notorious for their saturated fat. Didn't used to be that way. Seems when we started tricking animals into not eating grass in favor of corn, they started getting more and more saturated fat in their content. To think that even now, "corn-fed beef" is considered an advertising slogan. Ack. Give cows grass and the saturated fat content goes way the heck down. Seriously. Lastly is transfat. This stuff is evil. It's actually now banned in some places like happy NYC. These are entirely man-made nightmare fats in things like margarine and, oh, everything, that include the words "hydrogenated." Yuck. Paleo fat is all focused on unsaturated, and at that its focused mainly on mono-unsaturated, which is the stuff that kicks up your good HDL cholesterol. Have I lost you yet? (And to think I am not even getting into the weeds.)
Ok, so Paleo. Change around the ratios, change the types of fats and the types of carbs and kick up the protein and see what happens. Most people experience a few things when they follow this plan. First off, they get over the insulin-related highs and lows of the modern diet. No post-lunch sleepies. So energy gets a lot more regulated. Secondly, they get a lot more heart healthy and lean. These two things are big for me.
So as regimented as I am for my training, I am notoriously weak on the regimented nutrition. A few months ago when I gave up being vegetarian it was with a renewed interest in tackling that challenge. As my weight had started to come back down to something more close to my training and fighting weight, the nagging issue for me was body fat percentage. And it always has been. For someone as small as me, I have an exceptionally high body fat percentage. Because I don't eat well enough. So as of today I am 122 lbs with a 26.2% body fat. That's kinda crazy if you think about it. Here's what the American Council on Exercise publishes as general recommendations
Classification: Women (% fat) / Men (% fat)
Essential Fat: 10-12% / 2-4%
Athletes: 14-20% / 6-13%
Fitness: 21-24% / 14-17%
Acceptable: 25-31% / 18-25%
Obese: 32% plus / 25% plus
See what I mean? I am only in the acceptable range. Which if you think about the kind of stuff I am doing on a regular basis here is a little surprising. And this reads that its time to dial this in. So leaning me up a little is a good thing. Now I really don't want to lose more weight. I am kinda happy around 120. I can do 115. Anything below that is scary looking. So my goal is to add muscle while leaning up so it can offset it all and I don't have to look like Jack from A Nightmare Before Christmas. Cause that ain't hot, yo.So now you have the back story. Let's talk about where this is. Today is technically day 2. More like 2.5 since I started at the Crossfit "Paleo Potluck" on Sunday, where a number of the other athletes who are already on this kick got together for some communal food and fun. They all started this on November 1, so they have about 2 weeks up on me. Just enough to let me know what is in store for me.
My first 2 days have been shockingly challenging. I don't get cravings, honestly. I don't hanker chocolate or sugar or salt or much of anything. So this isn't about craving. It's about withdrawal. Breaking the addiction to the standard American fare carb garbage is hard. My first day I was, admittedly, downright hostile. The thing with me, however, is that I am both appreciating the transition as being something biochemically fascinating, as I am engaged in the reaction. So I waffle between "Hey, this feels kinda funky. Isn't it cool??" and "OMG if that kid doesn't stop screaming I may break it's windpipe." It was the kind of day I could have gotten into a fist-fight and then thoroughly analyzed the biochemistry of rage thereafter. Not.good.
I also noticed I was profoundly winded. I don't get sick often but last winter I got that case of bronchitis, which was a first for me, and it was the same kind of winded. I went from running 7 miles last week to struggling up a flight of stairs. It was odd. Secondly, I noticed I was nauseous. Mostly in the afternoons. By 1 pm, I want to throw up. If I can just get over the mindset and make sure I am eating anyway, it seems to pass. But its strange. Lastly, and perhaps most strangely, my body temperature has dropped a little. I know my body well. I can tell from a mile away if I am about to get sick. It's how I avoid it. This temperature shift though has nothing to do with getting sick. At all. It's withdrawal. I can feel it.
My biggest challenge right now is hitting my ratios. Truth is that though I didn't eat so healthy, I could usually nail my percentages which I had previously modeled more on the Zone diet (40% carb, 30% protein, 30% fat). It's not a dramatic shift in percentage for me, its more in the types of each that makes it a little harder for me to work out. Here's what I am looking at after figuring in dinner for tonight:
I'm fine on the fat with the nuts and some olive oil and fish and all that, but both the protein and carb percentages are too low. I have 450 calories I haven't accounted for just to maintain my current weight. This is notoriously a problem for me... I am often under calories, but now that I am eating a lot more food just to hit calories, its getting even more challenging. While the shift in food types is something I need to physically acclimate to, the method of eating is a huge procedural change for me that I am very thrown by. To make up for some of the deficit tonight, I'm going to throw a butternut squash into the oven with some sage and see if I can't get some carbs into me. The protein... not entirely sure how to fix that right now. But its a little closer.
So day 2 paleo. I can summarize it best by saying that I am well outside my comfort zone. Phrases like "I need to throw a butternut squash into the oven" aren't typical for me. But hey... it's good to be outside my comfort zone once and a while, right?
This is long. I hit post now. More later, with love from the cave.
Wednesday, November 12, 2008
Sweating Like a Pig.
I am a little too scientific for my own good. It's probably why I suck at cooking. I like things that are formulaic and that if I poke at hard enough and in the right directions eventually yields a relatively concrete answer. The world is a mystery and damn it if I am not going to solve it. And that solving pops up in really weird places.
So I've mentioned sweat rate before. It's been a while and I am totally not inclined to dig through the reams of my posts to find whether or not I expressed an opinion about sweat rate stuff, but being highly opinionated and not afraid to share said opinion, let me waste some of your precious time with my little rant.
Most athletes are told at one point or another to compute their sweat rate. They are given the following instructions:
1. Get nekkid. [CHECK.]
2. Get on scale. [Starting to lose appeal.]
3. Record weight. [Still more appeal waning.]
4. Go run for an hour. [I am sure most websites accidentally overlook the redressing part, but it could explain the occasional naked runner or the entire Bay to Breakers experience.]
5. Get nekkid and dry again. [CHECK.]
6. Re-weigh. [CHECK.]
7. Determine sweat rate using formula: Pounds Lost x 16 + Ounces Consumed During Exercise [UMM... Hang on a minute there.]
So this thing pops out some random fluid ounces you are supposed to drink in an hour when you are exercising. Tie a nice little bow around it and fill your water bottles, ladies and gentlemen, you now know your fluid requirements.
IF YOU ARE STUPID.
Seriously. I mean, come on! And everyone is doing this. Does no one engage the critical thinking part of their brains anymore?! As if you are operating in that tiny a little vacuum?!
What happened to things like, oh... I sweat more when I run than when I bike. What about when I swim? (*JC's brain begins to calculate the approximate ounce in a freak-out-swim-gulp*) What about things like... oh... TEMPERATURE?! HUMIDITY?!? INTENSITY?!? CLOTHING?!?
Do people not stop to think there might be a wee bit of variety between, let's say, being dressed in a snowsuit in the sahara desert in august while being chased by a cheetah (cause, yeah, they totally hang out in deserts. Haven't you heard of the sand cheetah? D'uh!) and let's say Borat running this year's NYC Marathon? I mean, here is me out there on my little twig of a limb thinking maybe there might be a freaking difference. Call me crazy.
And maybe this accounts for all kinds of ill-preparedness in distance racing. I mean, I'm in my glass house here, right? I'm the moron who wore shoes she hadn't really trained on roads in only to have it bite her in the butt. But if there is one thing I've learned its hydration. Know thy body. Stay hydrated all the time and don't expect that the day of the race itself is the only time you gotta deal with it. But as the distances get amped up over time and as the preparation for it begins to deepen (I am working on defining my race list for next year, cause I am racing it, dagnabbit.), I know that I need to begin to dial that in a little tighter because I also need to start dialing in the electrolytes and the sodium. No more queasy puke-inducing runs. No more feeling drained because the electrolytes aren't happening. And sure as heck no more hitting walls and getting dropped by them. So we gots to get serious.
Look, sweat rate is a factor of a lot of things. And those things aren't hard to figure out. Heck my little garmin does most of the work for me, all I got to do is use da brain to see da pattern. Let's start with looking at a few things, shall we. We'll start with the following factors to consider:
1. Type of exercise.
2. Intensity (hmm... heart rate monitor, much?)
3. Temperature. (*coughWEATHER.COMcough*)
4. Humidity. (*coughYOU DIDNT CLOSE WEATHER.COM DID YOUcough*)
We could probably leave it there, if you think about it. I mean, quantifying the wicking quality of clothes to figure out if i am running in the equivalent of a plastic bag might be a little too scientific for even me. But you get where I am going with this. (Ooooh, or the solar radiation absorption level of varied running surfaces!)
Look this is all stuff I am already maintaining. I always have. I have probably 3 years worth of workout data in my fancy little tracking program along with my caloric intake for almost as long (ain't nothin more humbling than being able to scientifically quantify the poundage of Amy's Macaroni and Cheese that has fueled my many athletic successes over the years). So for me dialing this kind of stuff in is just a matter of plotting and crunching. Not hard. But it should really prove valuable when I start defining fluid intakes for races and then wake up the morning of the race and realized Mother Nature has thrown a New England-style weather curveball at me and left me to compete in pea soup. I wish more people would start to consider some of the factors too. Numbers that are freely available shouldn't be so scary. And people need to stop buying into the reductionism of our cracked out little quick-answer world.
Which brings me to my next topic. Cavemen. Or Cavewomen. Or Cavetransgendered. Whatever floats your boat. I gave up the whole vegetarian thing several months ago. Try as I might I just could not keep muscle on me. It's been my battle ever since I started training and racing. The day I woke up and popped onto the scale and was down to 105 I realized I needed to do something about it. Whey protein supplementation never cut it. It helped, don't get me wrong, but left to my own devices I am made up of 3 things. Bone. Skin. Happy layer of puff separating the other two. My molten chewy marshmellowy layer. Not muscle. So that needed to change. So I gathered the woodland creatures and they agreed to sacrifice a few on my behalf.
Rules for the agreement:
1. Cows don't eat corn. Ever. Find me a cow chewing on a corn stalk and I'll be proven wrong. Left to their own devices cows eat grass. And sometimes boot-laces from back in my days working at the barn. Not corn. Cows that eat corn come from another planet and the woodland creatures and I agreed to eat from this planet. Grass only.
2. God gave me legs so I can use em. 2 of them to keep me from hopping too much. God also gave legs to chickens. He meant for them to be used to. It's why he gave them fake pansy wings (my proof that god has a sense of humor). If my chicken cannot walk it is a land manatee and those are endangered and taste bitter. No non-ambulatory chickens.
3. Pigs have tails. That's why people wear their hair in pigtails. If pigs didn't have tails everyone would look like Princess Leia. Back when I was 7 that was hot. It's not now. All consumed pigs must have tails. Which requires a lot of roaming around space. Pigs don't have fingernails to bite when they are nervous so pig tails are good substitutes.
Other than that, the woodland gave me the go ahead and I rejoined the pack of omnivores. And now I can eat like a cavetransgendered person. This means that in the next few weeks JC will stop hoeing her many fields and cultivating her Aztec Quinoa and searching high and low for the merry land of pastaville and will begin eating in a way that should keep her from losing still more muscle mass while allowing the marshmellowy goodness to congeal into something a little hotter. No more pillsbury dough boy over here, cavetransperson is getting lean.
Ok more later. Must.go.to.yoga. Last boxing class in the AM. Oh and ran 7.14 miles this morning. Longest since Boston Marathon. Felt good. Too slow tho. But that'll work itself out in time.
So I've mentioned sweat rate before. It's been a while and I am totally not inclined to dig through the reams of my posts to find whether or not I expressed an opinion about sweat rate stuff, but being highly opinionated and not afraid to share said opinion, let me waste some of your precious time with my little rant.
Most athletes are told at one point or another to compute their sweat rate. They are given the following instructions:
1. Get nekkid. [CHECK.]
2. Get on scale. [Starting to lose appeal.]
3. Record weight. [Still more appeal waning.]
4. Go run for an hour. [I am sure most websites accidentally overlook the redressing part, but it could explain the occasional naked runner or the entire Bay to Breakers experience.]
5. Get nekkid and dry again. [CHECK.]
6. Re-weigh. [CHECK.]
7. Determine sweat rate using formula: Pounds Lost x 16 + Ounces Consumed During Exercise [UMM... Hang on a minute there.]
So this thing pops out some random fluid ounces you are supposed to drink in an hour when you are exercising. Tie a nice little bow around it and fill your water bottles, ladies and gentlemen, you now know your fluid requirements.
IF YOU ARE STUPID.
Seriously. I mean, come on! And everyone is doing this. Does no one engage the critical thinking part of their brains anymore?! As if you are operating in that tiny a little vacuum?!
What happened to things like, oh... I sweat more when I run than when I bike. What about when I swim? (*JC's brain begins to calculate the approximate ounce in a freak-out-swim-gulp*) What about things like... oh... TEMPERATURE?! HUMIDITY?!? INTENSITY?!? CLOTHING?!?
Do people not stop to think there might be a wee bit of variety between, let's say, being dressed in a snowsuit in the sahara desert in august while being chased by a cheetah (cause, yeah, they totally hang out in deserts. Haven't you heard of the sand cheetah? D'uh!) and let's say Borat running this year's NYC Marathon? I mean, here is me out there on my little twig of a limb thinking maybe there might be a freaking difference. Call me crazy.And maybe this accounts for all kinds of ill-preparedness in distance racing. I mean, I'm in my glass house here, right? I'm the moron who wore shoes she hadn't really trained on roads in only to have it bite her in the butt. But if there is one thing I've learned its hydration. Know thy body. Stay hydrated all the time and don't expect that the day of the race itself is the only time you gotta deal with it. But as the distances get amped up over time and as the preparation for it begins to deepen (I am working on defining my race list for next year, cause I am racing it, dagnabbit.), I know that I need to begin to dial that in a little tighter because I also need to start dialing in the electrolytes and the sodium. No more queasy puke-inducing runs. No more feeling drained because the electrolytes aren't happening. And sure as heck no more hitting walls and getting dropped by them. So we gots to get serious.
Look, sweat rate is a factor of a lot of things. And those things aren't hard to figure out. Heck my little garmin does most of the work for me, all I got to do is use da brain to see da pattern. Let's start with looking at a few things, shall we. We'll start with the following factors to consider:
1. Type of exercise.
2. Intensity (hmm... heart rate monitor, much?)
3. Temperature. (*coughWEATHER.COMcough*)
4. Humidity. (*coughYOU DIDNT CLOSE WEATHER.COM DID YOUcough*)
We could probably leave it there, if you think about it. I mean, quantifying the wicking quality of clothes to figure out if i am running in the equivalent of a plastic bag might be a little too scientific for even me. But you get where I am going with this. (Ooooh, or the solar radiation absorption level of varied running surfaces!)
Look this is all stuff I am already maintaining. I always have. I have probably 3 years worth of workout data in my fancy little tracking program along with my caloric intake for almost as long (ain't nothin more humbling than being able to scientifically quantify the poundage of Amy's Macaroni and Cheese that has fueled my many athletic successes over the years). So for me dialing this kind of stuff in is just a matter of plotting and crunching. Not hard. But it should really prove valuable when I start defining fluid intakes for races and then wake up the morning of the race and realized Mother Nature has thrown a New England-style weather curveball at me and left me to compete in pea soup. I wish more people would start to consider some of the factors too. Numbers that are freely available shouldn't be so scary. And people need to stop buying into the reductionism of our cracked out little quick-answer world.
Which brings me to my next topic. Cavemen. Or Cavewomen. Or Cavetransgendered. Whatever floats your boat. I gave up the whole vegetarian thing several months ago. Try as I might I just could not keep muscle on me. It's been my battle ever since I started training and racing. The day I woke up and popped onto the scale and was down to 105 I realized I needed to do something about it. Whey protein supplementation never cut it. It helped, don't get me wrong, but left to my own devices I am made up of 3 things. Bone. Skin. Happy layer of puff separating the other two. My molten chewy marshmellowy layer. Not muscle. So that needed to change. So I gathered the woodland creatures and they agreed to sacrifice a few on my behalf.
Rules for the agreement:
1. Cows don't eat corn. Ever. Find me a cow chewing on a corn stalk and I'll be proven wrong. Left to their own devices cows eat grass. And sometimes boot-laces from back in my days working at the barn. Not corn. Cows that eat corn come from another planet and the woodland creatures and I agreed to eat from this planet. Grass only.
2. God gave me legs so I can use em. 2 of them to keep me from hopping too much. God also gave legs to chickens. He meant for them to be used to. It's why he gave them fake pansy wings (my proof that god has a sense of humor). If my chicken cannot walk it is a land manatee and those are endangered and taste bitter. No non-ambulatory chickens.
3. Pigs have tails. That's why people wear their hair in pigtails. If pigs didn't have tails everyone would look like Princess Leia. Back when I was 7 that was hot. It's not now. All consumed pigs must have tails. Which requires a lot of roaming around space. Pigs don't have fingernails to bite when they are nervous so pig tails are good substitutes.
Other than that, the woodland gave me the go ahead and I rejoined the pack of omnivores. And now I can eat like a cavetransgendered person. This means that in the next few weeks JC will stop hoeing her many fields and cultivating her Aztec Quinoa and searching high and low for the merry land of pastaville and will begin eating in a way that should keep her from losing still more muscle mass while allowing the marshmellowy goodness to congeal into something a little hotter. No more pillsbury dough boy over here, cavetransperson is getting lean.
Ok more later. Must.go.to.yoga. Last boxing class in the AM. Oh and ran 7.14 miles this morning. Longest since Boston Marathon. Felt good. Too slow tho. But that'll work itself out in time.
Tuesday, November 11, 2008
She Emerges, Relatively Unscathed
Of course, I may totally be jinxing myself now-- cause I still got one class to go, but... this is my last week of boxing. And the truth is, I am kind of sad about it.
I am definitely not going to miss the 5am wake-up. Most days I get up at 5:45 and those 45 minutes to me are just really.freaking.crucial to my well-being. It's a mental thing, no doubt. But mentally, I like seeing the clock closer to 6am than 4:30. The good news is that I have enough commute time to wake up to coffee brewing (god bless the world for coffee pots with timers) instead of electronic beeping and buzzing-- that definitely makes it feel more civilized, but that's still not saying much.
What I am going to miss is the crew at Trinity. Jon (aka Chachi), John, Shamir and Oleg have really made for some fun times. They've gotten used to my sense of humor and it just kind of rolls from there. I've gotten better. My feet are moving and on occasion, so are my hips. I get told to tighten up my arms a lot less now. I've found the beginning of some good rhythm on both the speed bag and on the double-ended bag. And I have found some stamina against the heavy bag. I've gotten better at slipping and weaving and executing more of the punches in the ring. I have a very long way to go, but I finally feel like I have a decent enough foundation to leverage. So here's what it comes down to. Money. Doesn't it always? Sessions work out to $45 unless you get unlimited at $200/mth. And while I could potentially swing that if it was important to me, not at the same time that I am doing Crossfit. And Crossfit wins, end of story. Which means I need to find a way to carry on on my own.
I can totally do that. Worst case I wind up with a heavy bag in my bedroom. And I mean, come on... people are gonna have 2 reactions to that. If they know me they'll know its pretty freaking rockin. Especially if they knew me back in the fat couch potato days. And if they don't know me well enough to think its hot, they aren't welcome in my bedroom and will probably get clothes-lined on the pull up bar blocking the door anyway. So screw em. (Awesome side note... a few short weeks ago we got the Beach Blanket Baroness to do a pull-up of her own on that very bar. That was off the hook.)
Here's my other thing. I got a lot to learn still. Not just boxing. See, I am out there learning it all. I never know what I am going to love until I do it. And I never know what little crazy athletic endeavor will bring me the break-throughs I want right now. So I still have a list of things I want to do yet. Top of that list, you ask? Krav Maga (the "martial art" of the Israeli military) and Trapeze. Back when I unstuck myself from the couch I promised to get younger each and every year. I got a promise to myself to fulfill. Boston Marathon... check. Growing younger... gettin there.
So tomorrow is a run morning this modified week-- we swapped run and boxing mornings. Plan is for a longer run. And it will be my rave run-- the Brooklyn Bridge. Just for the history alone, I will never get tired of that spot. It epitomizes the turn into the industrial age. When stone meets steel and the two magically trade places. Right there. And engineering was never the same. And I get to take it in, run after run. In the footsteps of Walt Whitman. In the air of Emma Lazarus. 135 feet above the water. It will never.get.old. Me, some sneakers, Roebling's bridge. Carin is planning on joining.
Tomorrow night is yoga but it may get pre-empted by protest for Prop 8. I gots to stand with my Californian's. For them, I share a sentiment I am as passionate about as the Bridge, but perhaps not as eloquent as Mr. Olbermann.
I'd much rather live in a world with a lot more love in it.
Ok lastly... a teaser. More on this in a later post. Soon, I promise. I got the go-ahead from my doctor today to play around with the Paleo Diet. (And yes, I do actually run all these things by my Doctor.) Yep... we are going all caveman. So get ready. More coming.
I am definitely not going to miss the 5am wake-up. Most days I get up at 5:45 and those 45 minutes to me are just really.freaking.crucial to my well-being. It's a mental thing, no doubt. But mentally, I like seeing the clock closer to 6am than 4:30. The good news is that I have enough commute time to wake up to coffee brewing (god bless the world for coffee pots with timers) instead of electronic beeping and buzzing-- that definitely makes it feel more civilized, but that's still not saying much.
What I am going to miss is the crew at Trinity. Jon (aka Chachi), John, Shamir and Oleg have really made for some fun times. They've gotten used to my sense of humor and it just kind of rolls from there. I've gotten better. My feet are moving and on occasion, so are my hips. I get told to tighten up my arms a lot less now. I've found the beginning of some good rhythm on both the speed bag and on the double-ended bag. And I have found some stamina against the heavy bag. I've gotten better at slipping and weaving and executing more of the punches in the ring. I have a very long way to go, but I finally feel like I have a decent enough foundation to leverage. So here's what it comes down to. Money. Doesn't it always? Sessions work out to $45 unless you get unlimited at $200/mth. And while I could potentially swing that if it was important to me, not at the same time that I am doing Crossfit. And Crossfit wins, end of story. Which means I need to find a way to carry on on my own.
I can totally do that. Worst case I wind up with a heavy bag in my bedroom. And I mean, come on... people are gonna have 2 reactions to that. If they know me they'll know its pretty freaking rockin. Especially if they knew me back in the fat couch potato days. And if they don't know me well enough to think its hot, they aren't welcome in my bedroom and will probably get clothes-lined on the pull up bar blocking the door anyway. So screw em. (Awesome side note... a few short weeks ago we got the Beach Blanket Baroness to do a pull-up of her own on that very bar. That was off the hook.)
Here's my other thing. I got a lot to learn still. Not just boxing. See, I am out there learning it all. I never know what I am going to love until I do it. And I never know what little crazy athletic endeavor will bring me the break-throughs I want right now. So I still have a list of things I want to do yet. Top of that list, you ask? Krav Maga (the "martial art" of the Israeli military) and Trapeze. Back when I unstuck myself from the couch I promised to get younger each and every year. I got a promise to myself to fulfill. Boston Marathon... check. Growing younger... gettin there.
So tomorrow is a run morning this modified week-- we swapped run and boxing mornings. Plan is for a longer run. And it will be my rave run-- the Brooklyn Bridge. Just for the history alone, I will never get tired of that spot. It epitomizes the turn into the industrial age. When stone meets steel and the two magically trade places. Right there. And engineering was never the same. And I get to take it in, run after run. In the footsteps of Walt Whitman. In the air of Emma Lazarus. 135 feet above the water. It will never.get.old. Me, some sneakers, Roebling's bridge. Carin is planning on joining.
Tomorrow night is yoga but it may get pre-empted by protest for Prop 8. I gots to stand with my Californian's. For them, I share a sentiment I am as passionate about as the Bridge, but perhaps not as eloquent as Mr. Olbermann.
I'd much rather live in a world with a lot more love in it.
Ok lastly... a teaser. More on this in a later post. Soon, I promise. I got the go-ahead from my doctor today to play around with the Paleo Diet. (And yes, I do actually run all these things by my Doctor.) Yep... we are going all caveman. So get ready. More coming.
Monday, November 03, 2008
OMG, I Feel like a Slug.
This weekend was the NYC Marathon. I was supposed to run it. It was my promise to myself when I finally crossed the finish line at Boston-- this time I had something to prove (which was in large part that I could wear the right shoes this time). But when my hip injury made it all come to an abrupt end, the folks decided to hang on to their tickets and pay me a visit just for the sheer enjoyment of it.
And boy did we have enjoyment. And food. And not a lot of exercising. Maybe a little competitive napping with Catastrophe, but that's about it. We walked alot, but by New York standards this was a pretty normal non-athletic weekend. I loved it. But it definitely left me feeling a little guilty about it all. I'm a 2x a day workout kind of girl. I love it. I gripe about being up at the crack of dawn, but the truth is I love it. I'm in my element then. I'll grumble my way out the door and then all of a sudden its like some endorphins kick in and I find my rhythm and I know exactly what I've been put on this earth for. (Ok, even swimming.... I just struggle to talk myself into the cold pool.)
So this weekend I felt like a bit of a slug. Maybe I needed a slug weekend. Who knows. But at least I had boxing early this morning to kick the week off well. (My week is going to be wonky too with a mid-week trip). I was actually a little nauseous this morning... probably because my diet was a little richer over the weekend than normal, but I got over it soon enough.
Today we spent a lot more time actually boxing than doing the conditioning stuff too. I started to feel like I was hitting some of the right rhythms finally. Except with Oleg and his pool noodles. I'm still a mess there. We learned upper-cuts today and I feel like I can get that one better because finally I don't have to worry about planting a foot timed with the punch. And its one of the few punches where I know my wrist is straight. A lot of the hooks and stuff I can feel my wrists kind of curling in a little, which is bad. So I feel like if I get into a street fight my best bet is to step in close and upper-cut my heart out.
After beating me with the noodles for a while (I can tell Oleg gets frustrated with my inability to remember really long and complex combinations... left jab, left hook, right cross, slip right, slip left, right uppercut, right cross is really.freaking.hard.to.remember under duress) Oleg brought me back to the double-ended bag. Remember this thing from my first week. The one that I hit too hard and came and smacked me back. Yeah, here we are again. Me and Double and I ain't feelin da'mojo at all. Oleg makes this look easy-- rapid fire punches that the bag hardly moves as he is just keeping this thing going like well oiled machinery. Not so much with me. I take a few jabs at it and we are all over the place. But I keep trying. And trying. And trying. And finally Shamir, one of the trainers, tells me to think of this as the face of the least favorite boss I have ever had. And it clicked. I hit my rhythm. And off we went. Rapid fire punches and while the bag moved, it didn't go all over the place or nothin. It was relatively controlled and I could continue to hit it. No swing and a miss crap. It was good. And I even enjoyed it.
I also got to try out the speed bag this morning. There is something incredibly hot about watching someone work over the speed bag. I mean, if you're a boxer and you want to pick someone up with the impressive skills, this is the trick you're gonna pull outta the bag. It's hot. And I wanted to know how to do it. So Jon pulled my gloves off and taught me the basics and off I went. I couldn't do it for long, and when I got it down it was slow. But you could hear the beginning of the rhythm of it settling in. It's such a sound too. You can tell no matter how fast or slow someone is going that they have it right. It's all about hitting it in the sweet spot and letting it bounce back and forward before hitting it again-- it reminded me of my years of drumming... just settling into that meter. I could tell that with a little practice I might finally make it work.
We finished with more conditioning exercise, though not as much today as the last few weeks. We play this game in the small ring where 3 of the 4 corners have teeny little soccer cones set up in them and the goal is to run to a corner, pick up the cone and put it into the empty corner and then just keep going. It sounds silly and all, but it keeps your agility and your explosive movement pretty tuned. And the way you play it you are supposed to set your feet and your back before you pick up or place down the cone. So it's winds up feeling like a good little workout.
Overall I felt pretty good about boxing today. I have a long way to go, that's for certain... but its nice to feel like I might be making a little bit of progress. At least, though, I am enjoying it. And that's really what matters. I'm mixing it up. I'm staying outside my comfort zone. I am learning something new. I am meeting fun new people. And a nice little by-product of that is that I am getting into some even better shape than before. So I'd say that's a huge win-win, you know?
Tomorrow AM I am running, tomorrow PM I am switching in Crossfit because I leave town on Wednesday afternoon. And if I have to drop a workout, I don't want to miss my 2x/week crossfit or my 2x/week boxing. So I'll miss a swim and a run and hope to make it all up next week.
Oh and one last thing. *heh* I am totally thinking of re-arranging my bedroom to accommodate this new piece of equiment. Whaddaya think? What looks hotter in a girls bedroom but this?!? Mmmmhmm... that's right.
And boy did we have enjoyment. And food. And not a lot of exercising. Maybe a little competitive napping with Catastrophe, but that's about it. We walked alot, but by New York standards this was a pretty normal non-athletic weekend. I loved it. But it definitely left me feeling a little guilty about it all. I'm a 2x a day workout kind of girl. I love it. I gripe about being up at the crack of dawn, but the truth is I love it. I'm in my element then. I'll grumble my way out the door and then all of a sudden its like some endorphins kick in and I find my rhythm and I know exactly what I've been put on this earth for. (Ok, even swimming.... I just struggle to talk myself into the cold pool.)So this weekend I felt like a bit of a slug. Maybe I needed a slug weekend. Who knows. But at least I had boxing early this morning to kick the week off well. (My week is going to be wonky too with a mid-week trip). I was actually a little nauseous this morning... probably because my diet was a little richer over the weekend than normal, but I got over it soon enough.
Today we spent a lot more time actually boxing than doing the conditioning stuff too. I started to feel like I was hitting some of the right rhythms finally. Except with Oleg and his pool noodles. I'm still a mess there. We learned upper-cuts today and I feel like I can get that one better because finally I don't have to worry about planting a foot timed with the punch. And its one of the few punches where I know my wrist is straight. A lot of the hooks and stuff I can feel my wrists kind of curling in a little, which is bad. So I feel like if I get into a street fight my best bet is to step in close and upper-cut my heart out.
After beating me with the noodles for a while (I can tell Oleg gets frustrated with my inability to remember really long and complex combinations... left jab, left hook, right cross, slip right, slip left, right uppercut, right cross is really.freaking.hard.to.remember under duress) Oleg brought me back to the double-ended bag. Remember this thing from my first week. The one that I hit too hard and came and smacked me back. Yeah, here we are again. Me and Double and I ain't feelin da'mojo at all. Oleg makes this look easy-- rapid fire punches that the bag hardly moves as he is just keeping this thing going like well oiled machinery. Not so much with me. I take a few jabs at it and we are all over the place. But I keep trying. And trying. And trying. And finally Shamir, one of the trainers, tells me to think of this as the face of the least favorite boss I have ever had. And it clicked. I hit my rhythm. And off we went. Rapid fire punches and while the bag moved, it didn't go all over the place or nothin. It was relatively controlled and I could continue to hit it. No swing and a miss crap. It was good. And I even enjoyed it.
I also got to try out the speed bag this morning. There is something incredibly hot about watching someone work over the speed bag. I mean, if you're a boxer and you want to pick someone up with the impressive skills, this is the trick you're gonna pull outta the bag. It's hot. And I wanted to know how to do it. So Jon pulled my gloves off and taught me the basics and off I went. I couldn't do it for long, and when I got it down it was slow. But you could hear the beginning of the rhythm of it settling in. It's such a sound too. You can tell no matter how fast or slow someone is going that they have it right. It's all about hitting it in the sweet spot and letting it bounce back and forward before hitting it again-- it reminded me of my years of drumming... just settling into that meter. I could tell that with a little practice I might finally make it work.
We finished with more conditioning exercise, though not as much today as the last few weeks. We play this game in the small ring where 3 of the 4 corners have teeny little soccer cones set up in them and the goal is to run to a corner, pick up the cone and put it into the empty corner and then just keep going. It sounds silly and all, but it keeps your agility and your explosive movement pretty tuned. And the way you play it you are supposed to set your feet and your back before you pick up or place down the cone. So it's winds up feeling like a good little workout.
Overall I felt pretty good about boxing today. I have a long way to go, that's for certain... but its nice to feel like I might be making a little bit of progress. At least, though, I am enjoying it. And that's really what matters. I'm mixing it up. I'm staying outside my comfort zone. I am learning something new. I am meeting fun new people. And a nice little by-product of that is that I am getting into some even better shape than before. So I'd say that's a huge win-win, you know?
Tomorrow AM I am running, tomorrow PM I am switching in Crossfit because I leave town on Wednesday afternoon. And if I have to drop a workout, I don't want to miss my 2x/week crossfit or my 2x/week boxing. So I'll miss a swim and a run and hope to make it all up next week.
Oh and one last thing. *heh* I am totally thinking of re-arranging my bedroom to accommodate this new piece of equiment. Whaddaya think? What looks hotter in a girls bedroom but this?!? Mmmmhmm... that's right.Wednesday, October 29, 2008
It's Been a Topsy Turvy Week.
I've been all to aware of my lack o' blogging lately. Look, it comes down to this... workout or blog. And when push comes to shove, I am leaning towards the former. But I discovered that I wind up Twittering about it alot, so I put up a view to my twitter account so you can see whats going on. Call it the up-to-the-moment view of the back of the pack.
So a couple of things have been going on. Let's start with boxing. 3 of 8 lessons down. So far I have determined that I am in trouble if I get into a fight. And that boxing is a lot harder than it looks. Look, if you watch it and think, much like I did, that its some dumb people just knocking each other around, you are clearly missing half the action. There's a lot more orchestration to it than I anticipated. When I was a kid I was a drummer. Some would argue I was pretty good at it. Getting my body to do 4 things complimentary yet distinct really isn't new to me. Boxing takes it to a whole new level. And when you add in that I have one of 4 trainers poking and suggesting all the time, its unreal. Oleg is really big on me keeping my elbows in tight. It's not enough to keep your gloves up at your face (a huge challenge with borrowed gloves, btw, because those things STINK!), but you gotta keep tight. So there's an incredible reliance on the muscles of your pec minor and pec major to keep your body pulled in tight. Your feet are always moving. Always. The minute they aren't moving, you are in trouble. And they need to be moving in complimentary ways to each other, lest you wind up compromising your balance for even a moment.
Punches literally come from your hips which are driven from your feet, so you are constantly trading pressure back and forth, kicking out a heel, popping though a hip and your arm just follows. In cases like a hook your arm does nothing more than really pull an elbow up so your forearm is parallel to the floor... the rest is all the momentum of your body. All the while not losing your solid footing and balance and still moving. I come from a people that dance with just our lower bodies. You throw our upper bodies into the mix and we don't know what the hell to do. So it amazes me that my people are supposed to be good boxers too. God help any of the fighting Irish if they have gone through this transition as well. I love it, but I also suck at it. And I think, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I love it even more.
The trainers have all caught on to the fact that I don't quit things. And the minute you tell me to do something with the slightest bit of implication that it will be a challenge, I will bring my game (and usually my mouth too). There's nothing like 6am JC telling the Russian KGB to not waste her time with the girl workouts. Next thing you know I am running kettlebells up and down stairs 2 sets at a time for 10 minutes. While I think its a long time before I am in a ring for a match, lord help me, boxing is a much larger deal than I ever imagined. It kicks my ass and I love it. I go to bed at night after boxing very muscularly exhausted. I like that.
And then there is Crossfit. I didn't think I was going to like it this much. I mean I knew it could get me where I needed to be, but the idea of actually wanting to "lift heavy?!" If you had asked me about that a year ago, I'd have probably added it to my DNR list of crazy criteria (if I wake up wanting to "lift heavy" or if I wake up thinking I am straight, PULL THE PLUG!!). And yet, I don't know... there's a nagging little vision in the back of my head. Now mind you that little vision should reach fruition about my 60th birthday with all the form correction I need to implement here, but there it is all the same. I didn't think I would ever be able to relate to this mentality and yet, there it is. Even more surprising are the people in it.
These guys and gals aren't the typical grunts at a gym. You know the ones... you're there on your treadmill and they are making noises that are akin to a bowel stoppage of like a week. These guys aren't one trick ponies with chests like He-Man and legs like Olive Oil who are unable to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They seem to take a lot of aspects of fitness very seriously. Far more seriously than even the triathletes I know. There's this real sense of fitness being more than just how much you can press, but about what you put into your body and what you get out of your body. It's sustainable. It's a lot earthier and in touch than I expected. And then it feels tight. Like people actually are interesting and interested. It's tuned in and dialed in. And it is nothing like what I had expected. It's why I find the ample criticism you can find about Crossfit so strange indeed. Sure there are people on extremes, but this has to be the most grounded, technique-focused, balanced and education-focused a fitness program I've seen. It makes me think as much as it makes me push. And being the Virgo I am, that's got mad appeal. Finally a group of people that aren't telling me to get out of my own head.
Running has been ok. It's been steady, which alone is a blessing given that running post Marathon hasn't been that at all because of injuries. It's been slow though and I know I need to step it up real soon-- if I ever have a shot at earning my speed back, now is the time to start laying that framework. My swimming has been very erratic. The big challenge right now is the late night swims versus the early morning boxing. If I stick to my plan I get home at 10:30pm and am starving. And boxing has me up at 5am. So that winds up feeling painful for early in the week and throws off a lot of the rest of the schedule. I am disciplined in my 8-9 hours of sleep at night... especially when I am training 2x a day most days, so that little bump there is a huge hurdle for me. I may need to revisit the schedule if I keep the boxing going beyond these 4 weeks. Good news is that the coach has already seen some dramatic improvement in me just with the sheer distance alone. I have a lot of work to do on my pull still, but its getting better.
Cycling has been great, tho I am back to being indoors since its getting dark early and cold. My focus has mainly been on cadence lately. With the running and the Crossfit my legs are pretty strong... they just don't always have the speed to them, so winter goal is to acclimate my legs to a natural cadence of 90-95 rpm. I used to naturally land in the low 80s, so now I can already just naturally hit 90 fairly consistently. Now I need to adjust more tension into that over time and keep that speed up. That should spring me nicely into the spring. I need to work on evening out my strokes though. I am sure if I were hooked up to a voltage meter I'd find the transition points in my pedaling loses a lot. My gut says a lot of that is ankle flexion, so I am focusing some strength building in that these days too.
So it's a lot. I feel like once a week or so I come in here and unload these days. The good thing is that the twitter feed will help, but I gots to find my blogging mojo back. I'm working on that... I swear it.
More later, folks. Boxing and Crossfit tomorrow. I should be keeling over by 9pm tomorrow. Rockin.
So a couple of things have been going on. Let's start with boxing. 3 of 8 lessons down. So far I have determined that I am in trouble if I get into a fight. And that boxing is a lot harder than it looks. Look, if you watch it and think, much like I did, that its some dumb people just knocking each other around, you are clearly missing half the action. There's a lot more orchestration to it than I anticipated. When I was a kid I was a drummer. Some would argue I was pretty good at it. Getting my body to do 4 things complimentary yet distinct really isn't new to me. Boxing takes it to a whole new level. And when you add in that I have one of 4 trainers poking and suggesting all the time, its unreal. Oleg is really big on me keeping my elbows in tight. It's not enough to keep your gloves up at your face (a huge challenge with borrowed gloves, btw, because those things STINK!), but you gotta keep tight. So there's an incredible reliance on the muscles of your pec minor and pec major to keep your body pulled in tight. Your feet are always moving. Always. The minute they aren't moving, you are in trouble. And they need to be moving in complimentary ways to each other, lest you wind up compromising your balance for even a moment.
Punches literally come from your hips which are driven from your feet, so you are constantly trading pressure back and forth, kicking out a heel, popping though a hip and your arm just follows. In cases like a hook your arm does nothing more than really pull an elbow up so your forearm is parallel to the floor... the rest is all the momentum of your body. All the while not losing your solid footing and balance and still moving. I come from a people that dance with just our lower bodies. You throw our upper bodies into the mix and we don't know what the hell to do. So it amazes me that my people are supposed to be good boxers too. God help any of the fighting Irish if they have gone through this transition as well. I love it, but I also suck at it. And I think, being the glutton for punishment that I am, I love it even more.
The trainers have all caught on to the fact that I don't quit things. And the minute you tell me to do something with the slightest bit of implication that it will be a challenge, I will bring my game (and usually my mouth too). There's nothing like 6am JC telling the Russian KGB to not waste her time with the girl workouts. Next thing you know I am running kettlebells up and down stairs 2 sets at a time for 10 minutes. While I think its a long time before I am in a ring for a match, lord help me, boxing is a much larger deal than I ever imagined. It kicks my ass and I love it. I go to bed at night after boxing very muscularly exhausted. I like that. And then there is Crossfit. I didn't think I was going to like it this much. I mean I knew it could get me where I needed to be, but the idea of actually wanting to "lift heavy?!" If you had asked me about that a year ago, I'd have probably added it to my DNR list of crazy criteria (if I wake up wanting to "lift heavy" or if I wake up thinking I am straight, PULL THE PLUG!!). And yet, I don't know... there's a nagging little vision in the back of my head. Now mind you that little vision should reach fruition about my 60th birthday with all the form correction I need to implement here, but there it is all the same. I didn't think I would ever be able to relate to this mentality and yet, there it is. Even more surprising are the people in it.
These guys and gals aren't the typical grunts at a gym. You know the ones... you're there on your treadmill and they are making noises that are akin to a bowel stoppage of like a week. These guys aren't one trick ponies with chests like He-Man and legs like Olive Oil who are unable to pat themselves on the back for a job well done. They seem to take a lot of aspects of fitness very seriously. Far more seriously than even the triathletes I know. There's this real sense of fitness being more than just how much you can press, but about what you put into your body and what you get out of your body. It's sustainable. It's a lot earthier and in touch than I expected. And then it feels tight. Like people actually are interesting and interested. It's tuned in and dialed in. And it is nothing like what I had expected. It's why I find the ample criticism you can find about Crossfit so strange indeed. Sure there are people on extremes, but this has to be the most grounded, technique-focused, balanced and education-focused a fitness program I've seen. It makes me think as much as it makes me push. And being the Virgo I am, that's got mad appeal. Finally a group of people that aren't telling me to get out of my own head.Running has been ok. It's been steady, which alone is a blessing given that running post Marathon hasn't been that at all because of injuries. It's been slow though and I know I need to step it up real soon-- if I ever have a shot at earning my speed back, now is the time to start laying that framework. My swimming has been very erratic. The big challenge right now is the late night swims versus the early morning boxing. If I stick to my plan I get home at 10:30pm and am starving. And boxing has me up at 5am. So that winds up feeling painful for early in the week and throws off a lot of the rest of the schedule. I am disciplined in my 8-9 hours of sleep at night... especially when I am training 2x a day most days, so that little bump there is a huge hurdle for me. I may need to revisit the schedule if I keep the boxing going beyond these 4 weeks. Good news is that the coach has already seen some dramatic improvement in me just with the sheer distance alone. I have a lot of work to do on my pull still, but its getting better.
Cycling has been great, tho I am back to being indoors since its getting dark early and cold. My focus has mainly been on cadence lately. With the running and the Crossfit my legs are pretty strong... they just don't always have the speed to them, so winter goal is to acclimate my legs to a natural cadence of 90-95 rpm. I used to naturally land in the low 80s, so now I can already just naturally hit 90 fairly consistently. Now I need to adjust more tension into that over time and keep that speed up. That should spring me nicely into the spring. I need to work on evening out my strokes though. I am sure if I were hooked up to a voltage meter I'd find the transition points in my pedaling loses a lot. My gut says a lot of that is ankle flexion, so I am focusing some strength building in that these days too.
So it's a lot. I feel like once a week or so I come in here and unload these days. The good thing is that the twitter feed will help, but I gots to find my blogging mojo back. I'm working on that... I swear it.
More later, folks. Boxing and Crossfit tomorrow. I should be keeling over by 9pm tomorrow. Rockin.
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