Ask and ye shall receive.

I am fiberblasted...flabberblasted...fiberlglasted...oh geeze, blown away by how sore I am today.  I asked Kristina if it were possible to bring back the old tradition of playing Ultimate Frisbee this Thursday.  In years past Tom would bust out the bee and we would play maybe once a month for the entire class instead of doing a typical boot camp class.  Well as the title suggests, I asked and then received.  Needless to say, last night we played a killer game of Ultimate Frisbee and got in an absolute great workout.  I forwarded her the rules, ran out to Target and bought a Frisbee for her to keep with all our workout equipment with the hopes we can make this a little boot camp tradition.  I am more sore today than I have been the past couple of weeks.  Maybe it's from all the jockeying back and forth, the small bursts of sprinting, the reaching and jumping to block and stop plays, but I am sitting here now one sore mofo.  My feet, my legs, my back muscles, even my lungs, great googly moogly I am getting old.  Not going to lie, I hurt...all over.  But damn did we have fun.  Fitness is not just about power lifting, or winning races, or being the World's Toughest Mudder, sometimes it's about finding a way to get in a workout and having a good time.  We did both last night and I absolutely loved it.

And if you are anything like Brent and his new shiner, this is not how you catch a Frisbee.

Four for Four.

Christmas Eve and our last day in beautiful sunny Florida.  We fly home tomorrow to celebrate the holidays with my mom and brother.  I love coming down here for the holidays each year but am truly excited to spend tomorrow with my mom.  Because we come to Florida every Christmas I honestly cannot remember the last time I spent Christmas day with her.  I am thinking it has been at least six or seven years, that is too long.  But all of that will change tomorrow.  See you soon mom.

So I made a goal to workout every day while I was in Florida.  As of 30 minutes ago, I have one more gold star on my workout chart for the week.  Four days, four workouts.  It was not easy and we fit in the workouts whenever we could, like tonight.  We ate dinner, waited two hours and worked out in the driveway at 7 PM.  Gotta give props to the wife tonight because I was not feeling it.  We hung out with the family this morning, went to another family members house for a BBQ and by the time we got here I was just not wanting to workout.  Luckily the beautiful woman who sleeps next to me loves me dearly and helped push me to achieve my goal.  You know what they say, behind every man is a strong woman.  She was my strength tonight when I wanted to be weak and I am grateful, thank you Hila.

Tonight we made up our own workout from previous workouts we have done while away from home.  I will call this one The 1,000.  Five exercises with 200 of each, squats, bicep curls, jumping jacks, crunches and burpees.  I started with burpees and just did 20 of each until I hit ten sets.  We have done previous exercises like this, see The 1400 and 5-4-3-2-1, but with Hila being pregnant we modified some of them accordingly.  I think it worked out quite well.

Yesterday I woke up with a sore back (getting old sucks doesn't it?) so I had to modify the fitness trail workout we had planned.  Hila crushed out a leg day boot camp class while I did speed training on the trail.  The trail itself was two connected 1/4 mile laps, what I did was start with a warm up mile, then for the speed work I ran two 1/4 mile laps as fast as I could, then a 1/4 mile slow jog/walking lap, and repeated this for 4 rounds.  This was much more difficult than I thought it would be.  Hila did this while training for the marathon and I always just kind of assumed it would be easy since after every two laps you had a break for a bit.  Ha, I could not have been more wrong.  My plan was to sprint two then jog one but I was so exhausted after the two fast laps I was forced to walk.  Needless to say after this workout I was spent, and completely soaked.  It was pushing 88 degrees as well, so that is what I am going to use as my excuse as to why this was so hard, yeah that sounds good!

To recap here are my workouts for the week:
Day 1 - 4 mile run
Day 2 - Homemade workout class on the trail
Day 3 - Speed training on 1/4 mile track
Day 4 - The 1,000

I promised some pictures of the trail and here they are.  One of Hila and me working out and the other of just the trail itself.  Hila hooked me up with these Diptic pics, so once again thank you very much my love.

Eat, drink and be merry.

We are now approaching that interesting time when we have presented to us an abundance of high calorie food and drink at pretty much all times of the day.  Right this minute, there are two Christmas tins of cookies in the office.  A supplier brought lunch yesterday.  We fly to Florida this afternoon where I am expecting no less than six different types of cookies sitting on the counter, calling my name, awaiting my consumption.  For the first time in many years, I feel okay about this.  I always worry that I am going to gain weight on our annual Florida Christmas trip, and I worry because every year it happens.  I have no control over the food I will be eating for the next five days.  Again I am okay with this.  I will enjoy SOME cookies, I will enjoy my meals with my family.  I mean I only get so many opportunities to enjoy Grandma's home cooking.  I am okay with all this because I now know that this is life.  There are ups and downs, highs and lows.  All I can do is focus on what I can control.  What I can control is portion size and working out.

I will work out everyday in Florida.  I have a weeks worth of boot camp classes written down, I have resistance bands.  I also have two appendages on the southern half of my body called legs and they can take me many places I have never been.  I will run.  I love just going out and running with a GPS watch, you can literally go anywhere you want, see the world (well parts of central Florida anyway), it's glorious.  I will workout with my pregnant wife.  I will find a way to incorporate the holidays and my workout routine.  I am not saying it will be easy, I am lazy at heart, remember.  But I will make it happen.  Plus is will be close to 80 degrees everyday, umm yeahh, that's not going to suck.

I will focus on portion control and mindless eating.  I don't need six cookies in one sitting, but it's okay to enjoy one occasionally, they are delicious.  I can put away some food, I have, I do and I will.  I am just going to make sure I don't over do it.  I will make sure I have fresh vegetables at dinners, a side salad, something, anything than just gorging myself on unhealthy food.  I will beat the angry overeating monster most days, and I am sure he will get the better of me at least once.  All I can do is give it my best.

Enjoy the holidays, enjoy the time with family and friends, eat, drink and be merry, enjoy a cookie (not 10), eat a nice meal, drink wine but at some point get out there and go for a run, a walk, a bike ride, it's supposed to be nice for the next couple of days here, enjoy it (although not in the 80's where I will be, but they can't all be winners, am I right?).

Happy Holidays to all, and to all a goodnight!

I wish I wasn't lazy.

I used to think that most people did not want to workout simply because of fear.  Fear of pain.  Fear of others seeing your weaknesses.  Fear of pushing yourself beyond what you think are your limits.  While all of these are normal fears, some of which I still deal with today, each of them are able to be overcome.  I now think that the biggest reason (excuse) for not working out is laziness.  Lazy is not a fear but still infinitely more difficult to overcome.  Lazy is not just in your head it's also in your body.  It takes time, effort, pain to overcome laziness.  It takes winning, it even takes losing to overcome laziness.  Fear is something that once confronted is much easier to face the next time.  Laziness, not so much.  It's always lingering there, tapping you on the shoulder saying, "screw this, go home, do nothing."  It never, ever, ever goes away.

I want to be lazy everyday.  Every single moment of everyday.  All the time.  Right now.  It is always a battle.  To do or not to do.  Always always a battle.  And a battle that is often lost.  Saturday morning, it's raining but there are a million and one things I could do around the house.  None of which I want to do, I want to sit on the couch and read, next to my wife with Chow snoring in the corner.  That is what I want to do every morning.  But that is not a reality, things need to get done, runs need to be run, the garage needs organizing, food needs purchasing, nursery needs painting, the list is endless endless endless.  Sometimes laziness wins, sometimes it doesn't.

It takes weeks and weeks before working out becomes a habit, to even start and overcome the laziness.  It won't be easy, it's still not easy but it's worth it.  There are benefits.  Endless benefits.  We work because we need money, no money and eventually we are sleeping in a ditch off the interstate.  We don't workout because we are lazy, no working out and we are sleeping in a more permanent ditch sooner than we should.  If only we saw immediate results from working out.  No, that is not the right wording.  If only we saw our long term results immediately we all may be more inclined to workout.  Yes, that's what I wanted to say.  We don't see our longer, healthier life right now.  We live it for years to come.  We make small changes that lead to big results.  The results are there, they just take a while show themselves.  Make the change now to workout more and one day you will thank me, but more importantly your children will thank YOU.

I'm the only difference between impossible and possible.

I learned a long time ago the importance of setting goals.  Small, large, short term and long term goals.  They all are crucial to success.  Goals give you something to focus on, they pinpoint your destination.  Without a goal we are just aiming ourselves towards an objective with the hopes of coming close to hitting it.  A goal makes the route much more direct.  If our goal is getting from point A to point B, the closest distance between these two points is a straight line.  A goal is what keeps this line straight.  Without the goal we end up making a lot of unnecessary turns to get where we are going.  Yes we can still get there but it may take longer and on a longer journey it's easier to loose hope and turnaround and go home.  

I started this journey with two main long term goals, all round improvement in fitness and weight loss.  Throughout this journey I have made many short terms goals as well, focus on food, run more often, stick to my daily point allowance, add additional time to my daily workout, show up to class everyday, just to name a few.  It is because of each of these two different types of goals that I have found and continue to find success.  What I have tried to focus on is keeping my eye on the prize of my long term goal, overall fitness.  But it is these short terms goals that keep me in check.  Yes I want to get in better shape, but how do I get there?  Without the short term goals the end is too far away, it's overwhelmingly far away.  Starting this journey several months ago, I could not even see the finish line, in fact it was so far away I was not sure it existed.  I wanted it to exist but fear of the unknown and fear of hard work made it seem very far away.  As I thought of the finish line, I tried to think about what ways would help me get there.  Baby steps, one baby step at a time.  Daily goals, weekly goals, monthly goals, all of these baby steps compounded equal large steps closer to the ultimate goal.  It's a process and take time, a lot of time.  Sometimes it's hard to stay focused on the long term goals because we are so slowly coming up on the finish line.  The key is to start with smaller goals first.  When I was in boot camp for the Marines I so clearly remember them telling us to not think any farther in the future then your next meal, or the next Sunday.  "Chow to chow, Sunday to Sunday".  13 weeks of boot camp is painfully long and tedious.  The first week there thinking about how hard the remaining weeks were going to be was too much to deal with.  There were too many open possibilities ahead where life was just going to be awful.  After breakfast, don't think about anything else except lunch.  That is only 4-5 hours to try and process not 13 weeks.  I can deal with 4-5 hours of something, it's the much larger picture that is overwhelming.  The exact same applies to goals.  If little Johnny makes a goal of losing 20 pounds, and after six weeks he has only lost three pounds there is a chance that he might get discouraged and lose hope, possibly give up.  Yes, its great that Johnny make a goal to lose weight, but equally important to this long term goal are his short term goals.  With the 20 pound weight loss in mind, also make a goal to lose 1/2 pound in a week, or two pounds in a month.  These are much more achievable goals with immediate results, and it is because of the minor successes that you may feel even more focused as the weeks go by.  

We are a people who thrive off immediate satisfaction.  Because of this we stop caring or get bored very easily if we do not find this kind of satisfaction as quickly as we feel we should.  I find that because of short term goals, we still get this satisfaction that we are craving, and because of this short term satisfaction we are able to find ways to keep focus on our long term goals.  Make a goal, write it down, make it happen, repeat over and over and over again.

The RealAge Test.

So after the post yesterday, my trainer Tom sent me another "Fitness Age" test to take that takes into account many more details than age, fitness level, pulse, etc.  This test took me about 10 minutes to take and I tried to be as honest as possible.  There were definitely a lot of questions but worth it.  Hey look my real age is one year younger than my actual age.  Helloooo 33!!  I feel younger already.

Try it here.  Let me know what your RealAge is.

Of course one of the reasons my body is not as young as it could be is due to my diet.  I was already well aware of these issues but now I can see specifically where my faults may be.  I definitely don't eat enough whole grains, frankly with Weight Watchers grains are higher points and I just avoid them in hope to lose weight.  Looks like I need to find a balance between eating more whole grains and still losing weight.  The same applies to nuts, I just don't eat them.  I find I can eat a substantial more amount of food for the same points as I can a small handful of nuts.  So while they may be very good for you I find I don't just eat a small amount of nuts, they are usually shoveled in by the handful, negating the good benefits they contain.  

Next is weight.  Damn you BMI.  I have always been overweight, always.  Now I don't feel like I am fat by any means, I just am not as thin as I want to be.  Since I am exactly 6' tall, per this test my BMI (28.61) is pushing the obese category.  Really??  How can this be?  My issue with this is that it does not take into account my muscle mass or my generally large stature.  Not every person who is 6' tall weighs the same.  Yes I have weight to lose but for me to get less than 180 I would be stick thin, I don't want to be that thin.  Per this chart the lower section of a healthy weight is 140 pounds.  I could get to 180, cut off my right leg and still not weigh that little.  I guess everyone is different and all we can do is strive for the best everyday.  I may never weigh 180 pounds but I will try my hardest to make sure I am the healthiest weight I can be.  

Respect your body, it's the only one you have.

So I came across an interesting tool today that roughly calculates your "Fitness Age".  While I have not done much investigation as to how it works or how accurate it may be I still find this to be a good tool to determine how your fitness age compares to your actual age.

Calculate your fitness age here.

Younger than 20!  I like it.  Too bad I don't actually feel younger than 20.  I am so sore today I have a hard time getting out of my chair at work.  On a sore scale of 1 - 10, 1 being no pain and 10 being death, I am pushing a solid 37.  Yeah, that's sore.

I like the fact that my fitness age is much younger than my actual age.  That shows me that I am fit and I push what I think are the limits of my body.  We watch the Biggest Loser and I am amazed when they do the "Know Your Number" age difference of these people that are double their weight and internally they are 20 - 30 years older because of all the strain their body is under not just from weight but from all the health issues that come from being overweight.  I want to make sure that I am healthy and so is my family.  I have a child coming into this world and I will do everything in my power to make sure he/she learns early in life the importance of eating healthy and working out.  I did not learn this until I was well into my 20's, really into my 30's and now I have to work even harder to maintain my weight and my fitness level.  Regardless I will never go back, I will always be fit and I will always take care of my body, it's the only one I have.