Adjusted Reality

Y’all, I need a week off.  Not a week off being healthy.  Not a week off exercising.  A week off running, yeah, but that’s just to rest my (#$*%&ing heel.  Just a week off numbers, tracking, being neurotic, etc etc and so forth.

Last week was just one of those weeks – I didn’t go OVER my daily burn totals, but I certainly didn’t eat UNDER or at the low end like I have been.  The net result was maintaining from last week, which considering I’m careening right into that time of the month where I feel like a bag of water, but ultimately frustrating because it’s nearing the end of month 2 here, and I’m still hanging out right under 160.  That 3.3 lbs DB says I should be losing per month?  Notsomuch.

So I’m going to take a week off tracking formally.  I’m going to eat lots of veggies and fruits and healthy-feel-good-food and pay attention to how I feel.  I’m going to go for a lot of low impact swimming, biking, arc trainer, and other such similar things.  I rarely lose weight during this week of the month, so maybe it’s a clue from my body to just take a chill pill and relax a bit.

But without further ado, let’s crunch last week’s numbers:

Monday: 1820 in – 829 out (12 mile bike, 5k run) = 991

Tuesday: 1914 – 432 (30 mins DDR and abs) = 1482

Wednesday: 1913 – 532 (1 hour volleyball) = 1381

Thursday: 1634 – 381 (800m swim) = 1253

Friday: 1447 – 0 (rest) = 1447

Saturday: 2119 – 729 (5k race, obstacle course, abs) = 1390

Sunday: about 1400 – 0 (rest) = 1400

Avg calories in per day: 1749

Avg calories out per day: 414

Avg net calories per day: 1335

Avg deficit per day: 477, or just under 1 lb loss this week

Weight Monday morning: 159.8 (+0.2 from last week, -3.2 overall)

Let’s call it water weight and move on, shall we?

This week:

So I’m kinda playing it by ear.  I am taking the week off running, and I just haven’t had time/mindshare/desire to swim a lot, and I want to take it easy on the DDR as it is just a *little* aggravating on my heel, so I’m having a very bike heavy and arc trainer heavy week.  Here is the general plan, which I’ve already completed through Wed morning:

Monday: 11.5 mile bike ride

Tuesday: 14.5 mile bike ride (5 miles to work, 9.5 miles the long way home)

Wednesday: 40 mins arc trainer morning, abs/back tonight.

Thursday: no cardio, arms and legs, yoga.

Friday: bike commute, abs/back

Saturday: 30 mins arc trainer/DDR/walking adventure, arms and legs.

Sunday: morning bike ride, yoga.

Yeah, I’m gonna get flack for no days completely off.  But I am really really really enjoying this mellow moving a bit every day, especially when it’s part of my commute.  When I run and do crazy stuff I *need* my days off.  When I ride my bike and get to enjoy the outdoors I just want to do it more.  Even today’s wakeup session on the arc trainer was nice.  I really really really need to get back into weights and yoga, I’m having a feeling some of the heel issues I’m starting to see is from the lack of stretching, which sucks, because I should do that. And…even if I PLAN to workout both weekend days I usually end up ditching one.  So there.

As for eating, I’m not tracking.  Dailyburn keeps yelling at me for it but I will not repent.  I’m guessing that I’ve kept it around 1500 calories per day so far, give or take 100 either way.  I’ve consumed food if I was hungry, attempting to identify what my body needed (aka, last night, after a very meatless day and fairly light eating, I had a dinner of two turkey sausage patties, one grilled fish filet (not to be confused with the not-so-healthy filet o’ fish), a little leftover fiber spaghetti and marinara, a bagel thin and cream cheese, and a metric buttload of normandy veggies.  ‘Bout 600 calories in retrospect (which is normal for dinner), but who’s counting?  Apparently, I seem to not need to.

I did dip into the chocolate over the last few days.  One especially PMS-y day I think I might have consumed over 100 calories in chocolate.   Oops.  But honestly?  What I needed.  And considering most days I either abstain or maybe have ONE chocolate kiss?  Think I’m doing ok.  This weekend shouldn’t be too bad, minus our BBQ.  But I’m figuring on a nice bike ride that morning to pre-pay for my alcoholic transgressions, and then just be a reasonable human with the food.  A plan, I has it.

It will be interesting to see what the scale says next week.  Besides the whole water balloon thing going on around my belly, I’m feeling better.  Haven’t had the courage to try on the skinny jeans lately, but once I’m through zee week o bloat, I might get some moxie and do it and see.

Also, I signed up for the volleyball league at work.  It starts next week.  I couldn’t pass up how fun it was last week at the company fun day, plus how many calories it torched in an hour.  So I’ve got that, a potential mini-triathlon I’d like to do June 20th, an urban assault ride sometime in June I *probably* won’t do but was mentioned to me by a coworker that sounds like a blast, and I’m sure more stuff that will come across my radar here before I know it.

It seems that I am definitely having too much fun to regret not marathon training.  And I am so totally ok with that.  I’ve got 40 or so years until I *might* be too old to consider that as an option (though this is encouraging), so there’s time.

What are you having too much fun to not regret not doing this week?

EDIT: photos from the gladiator games are up!  Check it out if you’re interested – there is even one of me in there!

…what personal bests look like:

The little free 5k this weekend?  The one we *almost* ditched because we didn’t feel like it?  Because neither  of us had trained for it (we had both run ONCE in the last 2 weeks)?

Both significant personal bests.  25:10 for me (which beats my PB ever by about 1 minute, my race PB by 1:21), and 32:16 for Zliten, which is at least a few minutes better than he’s ever done.  It was just the right morning, the right course, and I am so very glad we decided to go!  I felt like I was bookin’ it, but since I rolled sans garmin (or timing watch even) and there were no mile markers, I had no clue.  I think that might have even helped.  Just kept going as fast as I could and keeping green tank top girl in my sights.  I even kicked hard and passed her at the end!

The obstacle course part?  Kinda fail.  I finished the 5k, cheered Zliten across the finish line, and then walked up and found out my wave was starting THEN.  I was already totally wasted from the run but I gave it my all.  I rocked the sprint, the army crawl, even the rope wall, but I just didn’t have the hand strength to get across the longest set of monkey bars ever.  I’m a little pissed about that.  I LOVED me some monkey bars as a kid.   I knew my time wouldn’t “count”, but I continued through the rest of the 10 and finished in about 6 minutes.  Suck!  Oh well, I was so pumped about earlier I just didn’t care too much.

The price I paid for a personal best?  I really aggravated my heel again (boo).   I think it’s a no run week again, I’m going to really work on stretching it (I’m starting to think it’s a muscle thing, not a bruis-y thing), icing it, and look into getting some new shoes, maybe even from a for-real running store that analyzes my gait.  I would like to have healthy feet again that don’t wuss out after a 5k.

More of the normal Monday stuff soon if life doesn’t continue with the too crazy (writing this while loading up stuff at work.  Yeah.  It sucks.).  Anyone else race this weekend?  Any one just do something super awesome non-race-y?  Think I look fierce there (ROAR!)?

There are reasons I haven’t been around.

Pictures ganked from Zliten and B at work.  Hope they don’t mind. 🙂

It’s a hard life, I tell ya.  More soon.  I still have to get through a bunch of work stuff at work, explore a new place to try swimming, and the 5k race/gladiator games thing this weekend.  I think I might die by Saturday afternoon, but it would be a good death.

What’s up with you, bloggyland?

So, with my whole messy long diatribe of frustration, I ended up having a really nice weekend and am just feeling kinda better about the whole ball of wax.  I am still a little frazzled about the swimming thing, but since my goal is really just to finish the first tri race, I think as long as I can get in soon it’ll be ok.  I started this week feeling pretty good about the scale and am going to work hard to keep the trend going.  I did a few other things I’ve been meaning to for a while – gave myself a manicure and pedicure (a lazy one, but one at that), and finally got my beads out and tinkered with some necklaces and bracelets.  And, most dramatically – Zliten gave me a pretty snazzy haircut:

It’s short enough right now, so I’m going to forgo the salon until it get a little longer and then see what’s what.

So, here’s last week by the numbers:

Monday: 1550 in – 775 out (12 mile bike and 20 mins arc trainer) = 775 (major oops, but I really really wasn’t hungrier)

Tuesday: 1439 in – 0 out (day off) = 1439

Wednesday: 1459 in – 450 out (45 mins DDR) = 1009

Thursday: 1604 in – 444 out (35 mins elliptical, 15 mins abs) = 1160

Friday: 1780 in – 471 out (10 mile bike ride) = 1309

Saturday: 1593 in – 600 out (60 mins DDR) = 993

Sunday: 1600 in – 339 out (2 mile walk, 4.5 mile bike) = 1261

This is probably my best week besides the first one – no wonder I’m starting off the week in a good spot!  If I can navigate 2 days of social situations where the food presented to me is not really under my control, I’ll be in good shape.

More Numbers:

Average intake per day: 1564

Average output per day: 439

Average net calories per day: 1125

Deficit: 687 calories per day, or about 1.5 lbs per week

Weight this morning: 159.6 (-1.6 from last week, -3.4 overall)

I’ll take it.  Moving on…

This week:

Monday: 12 mile bike, 2 mile run as slow as I need to (breaking the heel back in slooooowly)

Tuesday: 30 mins DDR

Wednesday: bike ride of some sort

Thursday: 30 min swim, weights

Friday: off

Saturday: 5k race, obstacle course gladiator thingee

Sunday: 30 min swim, weights

While I would *like* to take more days off this week, it’s just not in the cards.  I have a stupid busy social calendar for this week – Tuesday we’ve got one of those yelp events downtown, Wednesday we have a work team building thingee of tubing down the river, and then the last night of trivia of the season.  And if I’m going to imbibe, I’m gonna have to burn at least a little both days, so it’s really like one workout split into two.  Or that’s what I’m going to go with, at least.

I had planned to swim Sunday, but I just didn’t feel up for it that day.  Consuming about 50% of my (too low) calories the day before in alcohol did not a happy Quix make, and I’d already moved my ass that day with a 2 mile walk and 4.5 mile bike ride, so I called it even.  I was going to go Tuesday but I forgot about the event.  So now, it’s Thursday and damned if I can keep doing this another week *grrr*.  I WILL SWIM!!!

Other than that, looking forward to doing the 5k race and obstacle course thing – apparently it’s a contest that’s also a tryout for American Gladiators?  Not as if I have the stuff to make it, but hey, I’ll give it a go.  It’s a very running lite week, and I don’t think I’ve ever raced a 5k with this little training the weeks before, but it’s a good experiment.  Maybe I’ll be so rested that I’ll PR!

Goals for this week:

-Be strong and consume reasonably through Tuesday and Wednesday.

-Get a mother fucking swim in this week.

-Continue this nice little second wind I’ve caught.  No more 160s!!  Roar!

-Ease back into running slowly and don’t hurt myself.

What’s up for you this week?

So I wrote this long ass rant earlier about how I’m feeling like a failure lately.  It’s a little too whiny and negative to really post, but it helped me get some messy subconscious stuff out and visible to me, and I wanted to share my thought process when I work through a negative emotions day:

Problem: New Years Resolutions: fail.  I have not had one weigh in with my maintenance range.  My half marathon goal got trashed by a nasty cold, and I’m not doing a marathon now.  I haven’t touched a book, or been writing other than the blog.

Solution: Allow some things to slip to the back burner.  New accomplishments at work were something I hadn’t even anticipated making strides with this year.  I chose to not do the marathon of my own volition and instead chose a very worthy alternate goal, an olympic triathalon, which sounded like much more fun to train for and just about as badass on the proverbial athlete resume.  The book thing?  Also kinda fallen by the wayside with work.  I have doubts about how kindly my company would take to me being a published author while employed there, and I think the urgency there was a desire to find some way to support myself in lieu of my current career.  Now that I’m lovin’ it again, sadly, it’s going to go back to someday.  And that’s ok.  There is a reason for all of it.  I’m not just a worthless slob.

Problem: And let’s elaborate on the weight thing.  I am killing myself here and I’m barely in the 150’s.  Before I ditched the scale a few weeks before the half, I was around 157.  Then all of a sudden I woke up 2 months later at 163.  I cannot fathom how I gained SIX lbs.  And as much as I have an ethos of trying to forgive and move forward, I just can’t here right now.  And my friends – losing 10 lbs is SO MUCH HARDER than losing 100.  At 100 to go, you obviously have a lot of changes to do that make sense.  Y’know, not washing down your double cheeseburger with a chocolate shake and eating veggies instead of french fries.  Losing 10 lbs is hard because I don’t have easy big changes to make.  It is really one little decision that tests my willpower and resolve after another and another.  It’s tiring.  And frustrating because I’ve seen all these numbers on the scale before.  So it’s not like *woohoo, a new low* it’s *oh, I’m here again…* which is not nearly as exciting.

Also with the appearance, I am really frustrated with half my closet not fitting right.  Never thought 5-10 lbs would make that much of a difference, but it does.  Some pants that fit fine before give me a pooch.  So I can only wear them with looser shirts.  And some shirts that were perfectly fine in length are now too short.  So I’m back to wearing my size 8/10/12s instead of my 6/8/10s.  It makes me mad because I have worked SO HARD to earn the right to have a closet full of clothing that fits me and looks good.  I guess I just can’t have nice things.

Solution: I just gotta keep on keepin’ on.  I will continue on with my current plan.  It’s slow going but it seems to be working on a month by month view.  To appease Zliten (and to combat my crazies) I will try to whittle my exercise down to 5 days per week of training, and request that one other day we do something cool like a walking adventure or skating or climbing or something active.  So bike/swim one day, weights/swim one day, long bike one day, long run one day, bike/run one day, I guess.  All I’m missing is one session of weights and I can just wrap those around some of the other workouts in 10 – 15 min segments.

As for the food?  I’ll just keep taking stabs in the dark until I find the magic formula.  And not deviate too much from what I’m doing because it’s going (painfully slowly) in the right direction.  Then I will sell it and be rich!  Muahaha!  And really?  I need to remember that as frustrating as it is to me, 10 lbs is really and truly cosmetic.  Wah me, I’m a size 8 not a size 6.  Some of my XS shirts don’t fit anymore.  It’s not the end of the world.  I’m going to keep on towards it, but sheesh, not something to get my panties in a wad about.  Easier said than done, but here’s hoping.

Problem: I’m frustrated because I haven’t tackled the “finding somewhere to swim” yet.  If it were completely up to me I would be at a different place every day or 2 checking out pools but there is only so often that work/other obligations/can drag Zliten with since he’s joining up somewhere too.  I think it will probably be next Tuesday before we can make another attempt because we have other plans and priorities.  So my lovely idea to swim twice this week?  Absolute fail.  And getting access to a pool is going to cost us a lot, not to mention lessons… it just feels overwhelming.  Running was easy because all I need is shoes.  Biking, I’m getting over the whole “need Zliten to go with so I feel safe” thing and also getting over my hatred of gym bikes.  But of course, the swimming thing is what I need to work on the very most, and I don’t have a way to do it.

Solution: This Sunday if at all possible (I think I found a loophole in our schedule) I want to check out the Y up north that supposedly has an awesome lap pool and evaluate whether it’s worth the drive 2x week.  If not, next Tuesday begins the gym-ocolypse to see if we can find a good home that’s not too pricey.  With a nice pool.  That maybe offers lessons so we don’t have to spend an extra 50 bucks a month on that.  Argh!  I don’t know why this is stressing me out so but it is.  I just have to take solace in the fact that I was able to rock the full distance of the swim for the tri on my first… try (badup, ching!) so I should be ok in a pinch.  It’s really a priority when I go from sprint to olympic but that’s 2 months from now.

Problem: My hair is repulsive right now.  It’s at a really bad length where it doesn’t look good no matter WHAT I do with it.  I haven’t been bothering washing it more than once a week because it really doesn’t matter, it looks gross either way.  And I seem to be putting off and subconsciously scared of doing something about it.  Y’all, I’ve never been to a salon.  Maybe supercuts here or there in a pinch, but my hair has been tended to by my mother, and then by Zliten.  And I’ve had the same haircut since I was 14 – shoulder length or longer, all one length.  I am really wanting something *different* but terrified to go somewhere hip that will do something that requires a lot of maintenance and doesn’t work for working out.  Or that just looks god awful.  And with all this talk about pools costing a ton of money, I don’t want to spend 100 bucks on a haircut.  But I told myself I was going to not do the Zliten cut this time, I was going to do something different.  So here I sit.

Solution: First step – Zliten is cutting my hair tomorrow.  Asking for it a little bit longer than I really want it so I’m still motivated to go get it styled eventually, but if it’s really making me this unhappy, I need to deal with it.  And since I’m obviously not mentally ready to let someone else touch it yet, forcing myself into it is not the best idea.  It may be such a minor thing to y’all, but it has big significance to me.  Even when I was at my fattest, I was the chick with the cool long hair.  Now I don’t care for it to be long anymore, but I’m so afraid of getting a cut that makes my face look rounder.  Or ending up with something so high maintenance to make it look decent (hi2u late 90s jennifer anniston cut that looked HORRIBLE and took forever to grow out) that I just look like dog poopy for months.  Any of you girlier girls out there, I need HELP here.  What would you suggest for this mug with naturally wavy hair?  I just can’t do the “get up and style my hair” every morning thing – so it has to be get up (maybe put some product in, and possibly brush it) and go.

Problem: I’ve come to terms that I AM actually pretty bitter about the half marathon earlier this year.  Training so precisely and so hard for 3 months just to get sick sucked balls.  Plain and simple.  I want revenge.  I at least want a PR.  I mean, I’m terribly proud of my level of fitness that I could even consider running 13.1 miles hacking up a lung with a sore throat, and even come within 3 minutes of my previous time, but still.

Solution: The marathon I was going to run in November has a half.  I think I can do it with less training – especially if I’m just coming off training for an olympic tri – I’ll have great endurance and pretty fresh legs.  If not, I’m targeting a weekend of crazy – half marathon trail run one day, duathlon the next (with a campout in the middle).  That’s a special level of hell I will just be proud to finish.  It’s been the year of non-traditional road races so far, it might just continue.  But I need to rock another half marathon soon.  It is inevitable.

There are a couple more personal things I’ve worked through too and have a plan for.  It was a very productive thought day (and a very productive day at work, apparently I can have deep thoughts and crunch numbers in spreadsheets really well together).  So my take on negative thoughts: have ’em.  If you’re upset about something, be upset.  It’s healthy to be unhappy about things that aren’t right in your life no matter how trivial they are.  But make them a call to action rather than an excuse to wallow and be destructive.  In a former life I might have berated myself for being too much of a wuss to get a haircut.  Now I realize there are only so many scary things I can take on at once without breaking down, and this is not something to get upset about.  Make a to do list, and check them off as you can.

Your turn.  What’s got your panties in a wad?  What’s your plan of action to restore happiness and harmony?  If nothing – how do you plan to accept yourself as is?  And pleeeeease, who has suggestions about the haircut thing?