Work it, baby

[mamagotcha]

First of all, Happy Birthday (a day late) to lorraine_inwa, the best MIL I've ever had!

Secondly, I'm going to try to start an exercise branch of this journal. I'll put a filter on it, though, so I don't bore everyone to tears. Go ahead and comment if, for some inexplicable reason, you'd like to be on that filter.

So while I'm commenting a little bit on rawr_comm, I'm not quite yet feeling ready to post there. Lord knows why I'm dithering, but it just doesn't feel right and that's how it is. But I do see that some folks are getting benefit from posting their info, so we'll try it here.

So here's the sitch... Clay is home for a few hours on Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings, and we've made an arrangement with him: he watches Linc for an hour each of those days, and we pop for his Chipotle dinner and snacks while he runs his D&D game at the library on Thursday afternoons.

We're going to the gym at Bill's work. It's a good-sized facility, with locker rooms, lots of weight machines and free weights, a bunch of stair machines and treadmills, and a few recumbant bikes, along with a large dance floor area for classes (I've never seen a class going on in there, although I hear there is Zumba on T/F at 11am). There are several TVs around the machines, though they're usually not on when we get there. In fact, I'd say that the majority of the time we go, we're the only people there.

One difficulty is that Bill has to be there with me whenever I'm on the campus (they're VERY touchy about security, understandably in this stem-cell-skittish, bible-thumpin', anti-evolution region). So we've gotta get in there early enough that he's not starting work horribly late. Linc's been waking up around 8:30ish, then I rouse Clay 9ish, we eat and read the paper and get Linker dressed and fed, and try to be in the gym by 10.

The household scale has been funky for a while (low battery maybe?), so while I knew I was over 270, I wasn't sure by how much. The scale at Stowers on Wednesday (Jan. 31) said I was 287 (with shoes and clothes... I'll just keep weighing myself that way to stay consistent). Jeezus.

The thing I have to be most careful about is my right knee. If I screw that up again, then I really can't do much of anything until it's better. So I'm not going to do the stairs or bikes yet. I've decided just to spend most of the hour on a treadmill.

For some reason, they've replaced all their treadmills... only one of the original five are still there. What I like about the originals is that they have this place you can put your hands, and it reads your heart rate. When you start your session, you fill in your age and weight, and it calculates your target heart rate for you. There's a little graph that plots your HR, whether it's low or in the yellow ("weight loss"), orange ("cardio"), or red (too high) zones. I don't know why, but I really like seeing how my HR changes and trying to keep it at a particular level (mostly I'm aiming for about 140-149, the top of my orange zone).

I usually do the aerobic course, which is three gradual "peaks" of increased incline. Mostly my pace is around 2.5 and 3 (mph? I think so...). Not very fast, I know, but it's enough, combined with the inclines, to get the ol' ticker pumping to that CV zone, and that's what matters, right? Also, I feel much more safe and secure (less likely to stumble) at a slower pace. I imagine that as I get more agile, I'll feel more comfortable going faster.

I should also note that I might be a bit gunshy... at one point, I'd purchased a treadmill and twice had it stop dead while I was jogging on it, causing me to hurl myself forward and really bang myself up. I returned it for a full refund after the second time (even though I was much less than I am now, I guess I was just too huge for it), and it took a while to get my nerve up again. It seems that gym treadmills are much sturdier than the home ones, and I don't get the feeling that I'm too heavy for this one, but I still get a little hinky as the rate goes higher... so increasing the incline is going to be the way I get the workout for now.

I jotted down the specifics for the last few visits I had:

Monday, Jan. 21: First day, didn't record final numbers but I think I did about a mile.
Wednesday, Jan. 23: This was the broken iPod day. Best forgotten.
Friday, Jan. 25: 1.96 miles, 50 minutes, 365 calories burned
Monday, Jan. 28: 2.16 miles, 50 minutes, 378 calories burned
Wednesday, Jan. 31: 2.1 miles, 50 minutes, 141bpm average (didn't write the cals down)
Friday, Feb. 2: Clayton overslept, we didn't get to go to the gym, grrr. Gonna try to get in there today to make it up.

While I'm on the treadmill, Bill does a little bit of cardio on a stair machine and then does a circuit of the weight machines. When I'm done, we usually play table tennis for about 10-15 minutes.

I inherited a 1-gig iPod shuffle from Cordell, and I've been loading up podcasts to listen to. I've also got some techno music on there, but mostly I like the podcasts (so far it's been This American Life and Savage Love). I have found that I really, really HATE television (mostly the ads, but the morning TV programs - Judge Judy, The View, Tyra Banks, soaps - just drive me bonkers). But I also get bored out of my skull just trotting along in silence. So podcasts are going to be it for now.

Food: I'm not doing anything terribly drastic at the moment food-wise. I figure just getting the gym habit engrained in us all is enough of a challenge for the moment. I did take Michael Pollan's NYT magazine article ("Unhappy Meals") to heart and really upped our leafy green intake this week. I'm also following Neil Gaiman's advice and upping my grapefruit intake (mostly whole, but some juice now and again, too).

I'd like to add some more stretching and get back to doing yoga again (maybe on T/Th mornings?).

I guess that's the whole thing for right now. Thanks for reading, if you stuck with it. Comment if you want more, otherwise you needn't suffer again.

Comments

[mamagotcha.livejournal.com]

Sure, you can play too!

I'm not sure the elliptical is gonna work for me (see comment above this) but I'll give it another try or two and see what happens. It wasn't particularly hard on the knee, at least.

Good luck on your exercise journey, too!