We did it! Race for the Cure Part Deux

October 25th, 2011

If you were reading my blog last year you may recall that I decided to go out and learn to run again. I hadn’t run since high school and as a 30 something adult it wasn’t super easy to get back into running shape. I kept it up though and now I can say that I’m finally beginning to feel a bit like a runner. I competed in my first 5k last October in the Komen Race for the Cure. My husband dutifully tagged along and took photos and cheered me on. In May of this year, when a coworker was diagnosed with ALS, I decided to run another.

 This time my daughter joined me.  (I know she doesn’t look thrilled, but that’s just becuase teenage girls do not enjoy having their photos taken early in the morning, she actually had fun….but don’t tell anyone).

Again, my husband drove us to the race and photographed our finishes. It was after this race that he said that he too would like to start running, and so he did. I broke out the couch to 5k app again and we took off around the block. At first, he was a little overweight and miserable. He hated running, I mean really hated it. I’d prod him up the hills and force him to jog a mile and he’d grumble along beside me. Eventually he would get up and have his sneakers laced and ready to rock at the same pace as me. He purchased a new pair of running shoes and his own headphones for his ipod. He was keeping pace with me down and around the lake and back. He was running 2 or 3 miles now without any complaining. We signed up for the 2011 Komen Race for the Cure and he picked up his training. Some days he even beat me out of bed and more often than I’d like to admit, he put on his shoes and took off while I was laying under the covers grumbling about my alarm clock and nodding back off to sleep. As we approached the day of the race we took a long run together. He smoked me. I tried to keep up, but he was just too darn fast. Now a lean, mean running machine. On race day we both woke up at 6am and dressed for the cold weather. He drove us to the parking lot and we both whined a bit about wearing shorts in 40 degree weather. I still don’t have the proper running kit, I run in my two year old Gola tennis shoes that I wear for everything. I did grab some actual running shorts from Goodwill and I wore those. We wore our downhill jerseys because they are lightweight, breathe and wick away sweat. I grabbed gloves and ear warmers. We noted that the real runners were wearing tights and vests…good to note. I pulled my white gym socks up to my knees. I may look like a dork, but it’s nearly impossible to look fashionable when you are running anyway. I coach him on not taking off to run too fast, set a good pace  and stick to it. I warn him about the crowd surge when we first take off and that people will clump for the first half mile, so be patient and stick to the rear. Once you hit the one mile marker it’s safe to start passing people. There’s a big hill in the middle I warned him (he still hates hill climbing) and wished him luck. I told him I’d try to keep up with him, but I knew that I couldn’t. We hung together for the first mile or so and then he put on the gas. I turned on my Endomondo to track my pace. The first mile was crowded and difficult to get a steady pace. My first mile was the slowest as I jockeyed for position and walked a bit trying to move forward as the crowd initially surged and then came to a complete stop. I ran a 10:14 mile. Not bad for me, but not race pace either. The second mile was faster as I broke free of the crowd and really started pushing. I ran it in 9minutes flat. In the final mile I caught up with the faster pack and got choked in the crowd again. My knees and ankles burned from the overtraining that I had done in the two weeks leading up to the race. In fact, the Sunday before I took off on a seven mile jog. Not smart. I know some people run this distance for training all of the time, but I’d never run further than 4 miles, so this was not a good idea. However, I finished strong and I felt good. All told, I ran the 3.18 miles in 30 minutes and 13 seconds. I averaged a respectable 9:30min/mi pace. Not as good as last year, but about what I expected. My knees and ankles screamed and I hobbled off to find Jamie, tendinitis screaming at me to knock it off. Jamie and I met up and shared some water and swapped tales of our big race. He finished in 28 min and ran a 8:47 pace average. As he stood there looking svelte and accomplished I was proud. He ran his first charity race, hopefully the start of a long and healthy lifetime of running.

Did you run at the Komen 5K? If so, tell me about your experience in the comments below. Feel free to link to your blog, your Facebook or your Endomondo. I’d love to hear all about it. Congrats to everyone who competed in this year’s Race for the Cure.

Filed under Doing Good, Local to Baltimore, MD, Uncategorized | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comment (0)

And the Results are In!

May 2nd, 2011

I am happy to report on the results of my changes in diet, exercise and getting rid of a few unhealthy habits. My friends and family have been familiar with my ongoing battle with cigarettes through the years. As my husband liked to proclaim, “She’s the best quitter I know!” Unfortunately, what was meant by that was that I quit almost weekly, and then would cheat and smoke cigarettes and then renew my aim again. It was a long, hard and painful process but while I’m not yet to proclaim myself victorious, I can say that I have been doing sufficiently well to feel good about it. You can never really let your guard down with nicotine; it’s just waiting there for you to slip up. Fortunately I discovered the link between alcohol and cigarettes for me. It stared as me having a beer or a glass of wine and then wanting a cigarette. Somehow my twisted little brain decided that it was OK to just enjoy a beer or wine and cigarette on a Friday night after a tough week of work. And then Saturday…and maybe Sunday too, but I had to get it together by Monday. Then, at some crazy point I decided that if I had glass of alcohol, that a cigarette made perfect sense. Somehow this insanity escalated to the point that I would always have a beer on Friday night, just to justify my cigarette smoking. Now I had taken up regular imbibing as an opportunity to smoke? Fortunately I realized this and put a stop to this nonsensical, addicted mind and got it together. I decided that I was not allowed to smoke and for that fact, I really couldn’t drink either. I also didn’t want to gain weight when I quit smoking, so I started really pushing myself to work out regularly and watch my caloric intake as well. There are good and bad things about weighing yourself daily. The benefits are that you can track your progress on a chart that can be reviewed over a long period of time and also see how your diet is affecting you (eating too much salt causes water retention, etc). The bad is that your body weight can fluctuate by up to 5 lbs. per day.  If you aren’t expecting this kind of change it can cause you to feel as if you aren’t progressing and really set you back mentally. As an example, each time I’ve lost weight, I’ve gained a significant amount in the 48 hours before. I almost always see a spike of 2-3 pounds of weight gain on a Friday morning after a week of working out, and then a dramatic drop on the following Monday as I let my body rest and burn calories.

I purchased a scale that measures body fat percentage, water percentage and weight so that I could be sure to measure the fat loss. This allowed me to have the comfort of knowing that I wasn’t just losing a little water weight or wasting away my muscles instead of getting the fat deposits that I was seeking to search and destroy. I started out above 24% body fat earlier this year and I’m happy to report that today I weighed in and had achieved 22.7% body fat. Body fat is an excellent measurement and I set my sights on losing .5 lbs per week (to set my caloric limits) and .5% body fat per month. While you can lose up to 2lbs of week safely and a full percent of body fat, I’m just not that ambitious and I know that I am not likely to to do the recommended 60-90 minutes of exercise 5 days per week recommended by The American College of Sports Medicine and the American Heart Association. Those are certainly great to aspire to, but I work, cook meditate and occasionally like to spend time with my family. The CDC has some pretty flexible guidelines though and my exercise level does meet these guidelines. On days that I don’t work out to a video in the morning I’m committing to taking a brisk 10 minute walk at lunch to at least get my body moving. Occasionally I even climb the 14 flights of steps to my office to help wake me up during that 3 o’clock afternoon slump.  In the end, even though I don’t work out as much as I should and I still eat more sugar than is really good for me, by maintaining a healthy diet and trying to stay as close to vegan as I can stand and being sure to move around as much as possible and really getting at least one serious workout in a week over time; the proof is in the pudding after all. I zoomed out on that daily weight chart, with all of it’s crazy fluctuations, and here’s what I found:

I’ve maintained a steady downward trend on my weight and achieved a healthy body fat percentage of 22.7%! I’m going to continue to push myself because my Lose It! app assures me that I will reach my goal in June. I’m not as concerned about when I reach my goal, but I will continue to push until I reach a healthy, but athletic body fat percentage that will allow me to feel good, strong, healthy and ready to compete in my favorite sports (running and downhill mountain biking). I’ve got my Lose It! motivators configured to push to my Twitter feed, so if you want to get training with me we can help to push each other and track our results, so join me on my quest to become a lean, mean, meditating machine. Here’s to a fit and healthy summer!

Filed under Health and Wellness | Tags: , , , , , , | Comment (1)

Learning to Run

September 7th, 2010

I was once a track star. Not really. I was on the track team, but I was not the fastest and rarely won any races. I ran sprints and hurdles, namely 300M high hurdles, 110 hurdles, 200M, 400M and 800M relay. It turns out that being short is not an advantage when it comes to running fast; who knew. I did love to run though and despite my lack of speed I did win the award for prettiest over the hurdles, so there’s that.  Anyway, I flirted with running about 2 years ago when my husband decided that he was going to get up early and run in the morning. Unfortunately I am not a morning person. I’ve worked on adjusting my schedule over time to allow me to get out of bed at a decent hour to avoid making my poor daughter late for school and thus subject to detention for my slackerness, but I still don’t like it. I definitely wasn’t about to continue to drag myself out of bed to suffer, just getting up and ready was torture enough as it was. Fast forward to last month… My work is again sending out tons of emails about the Komen Race for the Cure. They are even giving away prizes; and that is a mighty nice looking Under Armour shirt. All I have to do is run a 5k you say? Sold! So, I registered to race. It was a timely announcement anyway as my Step-father’s sister passed away only weeks before from breast cancer in her early 30′s and my Mother-in-Law just survived breast cancer surgery and following radiation treatments. My best friend’s mother also has survived breast cancer and she is now a high risk for developing it herself. So, I decided to run. What the hay, everyone was born to run right? This is what our ancestors did for food for heaven’s sake. Surely an athletic, trim and healthy (ha ha!) 30 something like myself could run a measly 3+ miles. HA! Despite my athleticism I found that running is still a miserable, slogging, painful experience for me and I have only a few weeks before I run my race for the cure. (BTW, click the link and donate to my suffering for a good cause please). My first attempt at running again ended in painful shin splints, side stitches and general misery, so I decided to look for help. I read that the new school thought on running shoes is that too much cushion is bad for you. My $20 shoes from the local warehouse club with marshmallows for soles probably weren’t going to cut it. I switched over to my Gola classics which seemed to help me. I was able to run without feeling like I had been beaten with a baseball bat the next day, so that was good. Next, I needed to train to run the full 5k. My girlfriend indicated that anyone could do it, even my untrained self. I however beg to differ; clearly she has not seen me dragging my sorry self around the block looking like I may puke or pass out at any moment. As a quick back story, I recently upgraded my old 2004 cell phone to the new iPhone 4 and love the apps. Naturally I looked for a good running application and found the perfect one. It’s called Couch to 5k. It can take anyone, even those who have never run, or still hate it and make you a 5k racer. I love it! It lets you listen to your own music and even tweets your peeps that you’ve finished a new stage each time you run it. (This helps if you have motivator friends who track your progress but can’t actually run with you). The Couch to 5k program or C25K takes 9 weeks to get you in 5k form. It will teach you to increase your running gradually to the point that you can run 5k or 30 minutes straight. Ambitious? Yes, but it works. As an example, week 1 day 1 (each week is broken into 3 running sessions) has you do a 5 minute warm-up, followed by alternating 60 seconds of jogging with 90 seconds of walking for 20 minutes. Even I can do that! Today I will move on to week 5 session 2 (5.2) and I have in store for me today a 5 min. warm-up followed by an 8 min jog, then a 5 min walk and finishing up with an 8 min jog. Crazy right? The best part is that I’ll do it easily and still have energy to run more. I love this app!  I’ve been running regularly for a few weeks now and I really love it. It feels good, its a great stress reliever and I’ve already lost 5 lbs that I wasn’t expecting. It’s certainly slimming down my physique, which in my case is a good thing. I tend to have a stocky, muscle-bound appearance because of the action sports and weight lifting that I do, so this adds a nice balance. I’ll post some regular updates as I move closer to my race date and share my experiences as I grow into a real live runner. The best part about running I think is that I can do it anywhere at any time. I don’t really need a of special equipment and I don’t have to drive anywhere; it’s beautiful. So, if I can run, so can you. So get out there and pound the pavement!

Filed under Health and Wellness | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comment (1)

Getting Fit

April 19th, 2010

If you know me personally or follow my tweets, then you likely know that I’m an active gal. I enjoy snowboarding, downhill mountain biking, yoga, gardening, cooking and a variety of other activities (too many to name). Unfortunately now that I am over 30 (sssh, don’t tell anyone) my metabolism seems to have begun its expected slow down. In addition, I had abdominal surgery in October, then tore my meniscus in February. I also quit smoking and changed my diet to being primarily plant-based. Unfortunately I have gained weight (fat) and have now been working it off for the last several weeks. While I haven’t seen a significant difference in my appearance yet, I am beginning to feel more fit, which is great. I am currently continuing with my normal activities, but adding videos to my routine as well. The gym costs more than I am willing to spend right now, and honestly I could buy a new video every week and still save money. I purchased the following videos:
Jillian Michaels – 30 Day Shred
Jillian Michaels: No More Trouble Zones
10 Minute Solution – Kickbox Bootcamp
Weight Loss Cardio Kick

I am loving all of them so far. The 30 day shred is my daily standby and features 3 levels of exercise. It’s a 20 minute workout that features Jillian’s 3-2-1 system: 3 minutes strength training, 2 minutes of cardio and 1 minute of abs for 3 Circuits. You can start with level 1 and work your way up to level 3. She does have low and high impact versions of most exercise to allow you to really work your way up. I’ve hit level 3 now and I am still loving this video.

Jillian’s “trouble zones” video is tough! It goes straight to a level three as compared to “the shred”. It hurts every time I do this, but in a good way. I’m definately building muscle and getting some great definition as a result, but I can really only do it once a week or once every two weeks right now.

Both cardio kickboxing videos offer a variety of workouts that you can select and are high energy and fun. I enjoy these the most because they don’t feel like working out quite so much. I usually do one of these each week, usually on low energy days when I don’t feel like I can deal with Jillian.

Finally, I’ve signed up for FitDay.com’s free calorie and activity tracker. This system allows me to calculate my caloric burn by logging my daily activities and enter the foods that I eat to estimate my caloric intake. This will help me understand my nutrition in terms of carb/protein/fat balancing as well as ensuring that I continue to burn more calories than I eat. It also tracks my weight and gives me a graph so that I can measure my progress (or lack thereof).  So wish me luck on my journey to lose a few inches, maybe a few pounds and to get into race shape before the season is over. If you are interested, you can track my progress here.

Filed under Health and Wellness | Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , | Comment (1)