Lap-swimming 750 meters: 16 minutes.
Recumbent-biking 20 kilometers: 51 minutes.
Ellipticaling 5 kilometers: 35 minutes.
Completing a sprint triathlon (aka half an Olympic triathlon) at the gym: Priceless. Well, except the price I will pay in pain later today and tomorrow. That should be fun.
Now I have to see if I can actually bring those times down to something moderately respectable.
Posting’s going to be pretty light this week, as I’m trying to keep up the exercise even as we ramp up towards the first day of shooting on the pilot Friday.
At this point, I’m spending maybe half an hour each day at home that is not a) doing physical therapy or b) getting ready for work or c) sleeping.
So y’all may just have to entertain yourselves for a while.
People are dicks when they commit two key, related fouls in the lap pool at the gym:
1. Taking up over 2/3 of the very large lane, leaving me a sliver in which to swim. For the most part, I was okay, but this dick was…
2. Still managing to flail so wildly as to lock arms with me abruptly as he passed me going the opposite direction, leaving a huge bruise on my bicep and wrenching my back-shoulder muscle. He also smacked into me another time, but that was more annoying than all-day painful.
The fact that he did this on a day when I was going to be schlepping coolers and cases of water and mountains of paper around all day made it all the more delightful.
Congratulations, sir of the complete lack of attention and/or boundaries. You’re officially a dick.
And you owe me a bottle of Advil.
Having an hour and a half round trip commute, I’m trying to shave precious minutes off my various morning duties so that I can get a little more sleep.
In this spirit, I started swimming again. I can burn about the same number of calories swimming in 40 minutes as I can in about 1hr 20 when I’m on the elliptical/lifting.
I used to swim a lot. My junior year of high school, when I was in probably the best shape of my life (not to say it was particularly good, but that weight is what I’m shooting for with all this exercise), I swam a kilometer every morning before school.
I swim too fast to make that worthwhile as a weight loss program, so I go about 2/3 farther, and swim a mile, which is taking me about 37-38 minutes. There are a few things I’d forgotten, good and bad, about swimming for exercise:
Anyway, I’m at least now getting about half an hour more sleep during the week, and feeling pretty good about still getting a good amount of exercise despite it not taking as long.
I realized today when I finally shed one very, very tenacious pound: I am lying about my weight on my driver’s license.
The difference from the previous state of affairs? I am now officially one pound lighter than my driver’s license claims I am, instead of being 20 pounds heavier, as I was when I first moved out here.
29 to go. Woo!
Good News: I was able to drag myself to the gym today and did 35 minutes on the elliptical, which felt great.
Bad News: Then I came home and passed out for four hours, which felt much better.
Hopefully tomorrow I’ll only pass out for 2-3 hours after working out…
A year ago this weekend, I got on the scale, and the number I saw almost made my eyes bug out of my head.
I’d had to greatly reduce my gym time because of my ongoing foot problems, and I hit a number I’d sworn I’d never let myself hit. I saw that number, and said, goddamn it, that’s it.
I am doing something about my weight, and I’m getting this shit off for good. I am losing the eighty pounds it will take me to get back to where I was my junior year of high school, when I was swimming a kilometer a day, five days a week.
I am not eating obscene amounts of food anymore, I am drawing a line in the fucking sand, and saying this is the end of being dangerously overweight and horribly out of shape.
Of course, I didn’t actually say anything about it at the time, because I’ve tried to draw these lines before. I’ve dieted and dieted and dieted and taken the occasional stab at exercise. It has always come back with a vengeance.
This time, it’s different. This time exercise is the primary objective, with portion control following. I didn’t go on a diet, I changed the way I live my life. And I’ll be goddamned: It actually worked.
One calendar year later, nine months of working out until I practically fell over at the gym later (plus three months off for foot surgery and related follies), I have dropped 42 pounds. More than halfway to my eventual goal, and a very encouraging distance from where I started.
Two jeans sizes (and close to a third) smaller. Wearing shit I haven’t worn in years. Weighing what I weighed my sophomore year of college, a ridiculous seven years ago.
If I sound like I’m proud of myself, I damn well am. I’ll be honest, I did not know if I could do this. But when I started keeping an eye on calories and actually working out at the gym, instead of just going to the gym, it started coming off.
I can almost leg press my own body weight now. I’m doing bicep curls with 85 lbs, and chest-pressing 90 (after being almost killed by 40 lbs on each at the beginning). And the difference both the weight loss and the strength training I’m doing have made with my bad leg are huge.
When I first tried to switch from the recumbent bike to the elliptical in October, I could barely do 5 minutes without feeling like my leg was going to fall off. Now I can do 25 minutes AFTER doing a strenuous half hour on the bike.
I just feel so much better physically, it’s hard to describe without using a corny and overly literal phrase like “a weight off my shoulders.”
There’s a whole section of my life that’s been throw into ridiculous turmoil lately, but for this to finally, FINALLY, start to go right, it gives me so much more confidence that I can overcome the other nonsense that I’ve stressed so much less about the turmoil than I would have a year ago.
I will now give myself public motivation to finish the job: My goal, and it is a pretty big one, is to lose the remaining 38 pounds by Halloween. That puts me at losing about five pounds a month, which is roughly the speed I’ve been going.
It has to be done, and for once in my life, I can finally say with confidence: It will.
A few New Year’s Resolutions, because if I post them somewhere, maybe I’ll actually live up to them:
1. Continue to lose weight. Have lost: 33 lbs (net; had lost 35 but gained back 2 lbs stuffing my face with Waffle House and other assorted goodies over the holidays). To lose: 47 lbs. Mark my words, it will be done by the end of 2008.
2. Relegate Mr. Cranky Ankle to his former status as My Left Ankle. I’ve been sick of this shit long enough, this is the year that my weight loss and continued diligence with my foot exercises finally pays off.
3. Get a good job. Getting a job is part one of this, since I kind of need to, you know, eat. But I want to get another job that I’ll be proud of, and not simply something that will get me through the duration of the strike.
4. Record songs I’ve written since last album. Once upon a time, I was a songwriter, and a half-decent one at that. Maybe I should at least put some tracks down to see if I can turn them into anything good.
5. Get out of the goddamn house. Between the entire Foot Fiasco of ’07 that prevented me from leaving the house for 2 months, and the ongoing foot issues that left me extremely reluctant to for most of the rest of the year because of the pain, I feel like I’ve turned into a complete hermit/crazy cat lady. I promise that, once I have a job to pay for it, I am going to go out and be a social person, dammit! Just as soon as I finish this disc of Battlestar Galactica that just came in from Netflix…
6. Finish Redesigning my website. Not the blog, this is certainly sufficient for me at the moment (who knows what I’ll think if I can’t find a job for a couple of months and get REALLY bored). But as several people have pointed out to me, the main site could use a little update. Probably best to try and make it less than five years old.
And those are really the major ones. I considered adding in “get a girlfriend,” as I suspect several people are awfully tired of hearing me whine about not having one, but I fear if I officially add it to the list, I’ll just jinx myself, and I’ve had enough bad luck in that department as is.
Anyway, Happy 2008! Enjoy yourselves, and for the love of god, don’t drink and drive. Unless you’re just drinking water. Then, I think you’re okay.
So I am here now, and I will make several observations.
1. It is not nearly as cold as I feared it would be. However, at about 27 degrees, it is still painfully cold for a SoCal wimp like me.
2. Good lord, Wheaten Terriers have a lot of energy. My mom had thought my aunt’s new dog was a Bichon Frisé, but it only looked like that when she was a puppy. Now she looks like a Honey I Blew Up The Bichon Frise, and was dragging me all over the black ice in the parking lot when I helped my aunt take her for a walk.
Still: Not taking me for a walk anywhere near as much as the late, lamented Rosie the Rottweiler.
3. Guest passes to health clubs are ridiculously expensive. My uncle was nice enough to get me one to the L.A. Fitness he goes to, and just for a week, it’s more than I pay for a month at 24 Hour Fitness. I felt bad, but I’m way too broke to make a magnanimous offer to pay for it, and will accept it as my xmas gift from him.
4. My god, Grandfather clocks are annoying if you’re not used to them. My aunt and uncle have one that BONGGGGs every 15 minutes, and I don’t know how the hell I’m going to be able to get to sleep tonight.
My god, it is so much easier to drag my ass to the gym when it’s at least a little light out.