Category Archives: fitness

So, I was THAT person at the gym…

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NO, not the tool who uses a machine and who fails to wipe it down. (ew)

NO, not the person who sings along with their iPod. (ew)

NO, not the person who lifts 250lbs and grunts like one of those guys from the World’s Strongest Man Competition. (*rolls eyes*)

I was (le sigh) the one who ended up throwing up – and I’m here to say it’s okay. Now, part of why it’s so okay is the fact that it wasn’t entirely due to my personal trainer’s efforts to get me a training routine that will come to the brink of just about to kill me; a lot of it was due to female troubles (*cough*) that have had me nauseous for days. Guys have no idea what manner of shit women have to put up with and they could never tolerate it for even six months in a row, much less decades.

Moving right along…

So, I consulted with the trainers at my office’s fitness center (where I work out) to see if I could get some personal training to help me better prepare for the marathon in September. I don’t have a ton of cash, but I did get some money for my birthday that I could use for this, and work will reimburse me for all but $5 of the 3-sessions’ worth of training that I signed up for. My plan is to use this training to help me get my legs in better shape so that my hips and knees won’t feel like they’re unhinging halfway through the marathon this year. Last year, I finished the marathon. This year, I want to finish strong(er).

My trainer set me up with three half-hour sessions, and my first session involved some partial squats (first without and then with 10lb free weights in each hand), some balance ball work and some “monster walks” (moving side to side with rubber bands around my legs). He has three more exercises to teach me, but things were cut short yesterday when I wasn’t able to think straight and needed to rest. The conversation:

Trainer (worried): Are you seeing stars?

Me: No – not yet. (ha ha)

Trainer: OK, well, that’s good. Do you feel like you need to throw up?

Me: Uh…I don’t think so.

Trainer (slight smile on his face): That means that you’re probably pretty close.

Now, I’ve heard of people who throw up from those boot camps, and I feel massive amounts of sympathy for them, because I can’t imagine going into a boot camp program and having my ass kicked in front of many people. Even here, this is in front of work people, but traffic when I go is low enough that it’s typically not a panic-inducer for me. And, thankfully, I had the presence of mind to walk (slowly) to the ladies locker room AND get to a bathroom stall before I threw up, so I consider it kind of a win.

I still need to go back another time to get the remaining 3 exercises down, so I can start the routine of alternating my walking with this. That will be either today or tomorrow. My quads are still somewhat sore at times, making me question just how strong I thought they were; it seems improbable that they were as solid as I thought for how much they were burning last night!

So, semi-humiliation of puking aside, and pain aside, I feel like I’m on the right path. Of course, these exercises have the potential to help me strengthen my legs (good for me and the marathon) and lose some weight (again, good for me and the marathon), so I’m actually looking forward to doing them. I think it’s 100x easier for me to take this on since I have a specific goal and it’s not something that I know I can’t do. I just have to get past having been that person.

And now I have.

Trying to do two marathons at once

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So, last year, dh and I did a walking marathon together. I have two bad knees, so running is OUT of the question, but I can walk for days. And, as the theory went, I should then be able to walk for a day straight, right? The answer is, as I discovered: YES. I chronicled this in a series of posts (starting with my decision to do the marathon in the first place), so that I could share what I went through. Part of why I did that was so that others who were interested in learning about what it’s like to walk a marathon could see what my experience was like, and part of it was to make a record for myself, so that I could remember (and not have the same issues with recovering this time out).

I decided that I want to walk the marathon again this year, and I have about 8 months to prepare this time – instead of the 2 months I had last time. I have a bunch of reasons for wanting to do this, but I feel like I have to fight for the time to train against the other marathon I’m in – the constant attempt to balance work, family, home, etc. I was on a Twitter party last night about fitness, and one of the questions that came up was about how you manage to get in your time for a workout when you’re balancing against the other things going on in your life (work, family, illness, etc.). When I was training hard during those two months, I manufactured time and dh was a huge part of that – reworking the schedule so that we could manage to free up time for me to do some lighter training during the week. I never did manage to get my act together to do more than a couple of longer training walks on the weekend.

Some of it is that I’m fighting myself – my desire to get sleep, my desire to keep dinner moving on time, my desire not to screw up dh’s schedule so that both of us can get in the right number of hours at work. Some of it is that dh also needs a shot at working out, and that means balancing the schedule of day care drop off/pick up to make it work for both of us. But, mostly, I know this is me – my block to get past. I have to draw a line in the sand and say that this is what I need to do.

The thing is: I learned last year that I can go an entire 26.2 miles in one day. I wasn’t really sure I could do it until I did. And then, when I did, I figured that I would get hooked and want to do it again. the answer is, naturally, YES. I don’t want to do it lots of times in a year, mostly because I’m not physically in any shape to commit to doing more than once a year. But I’d like to work on that. I’d like not to be a size 14/16 forever. I’d like to look at my legs and see muscle, not jiggle over muscle. Also, I’d like to be able to do that marathon again this year and not spend the last mile of it limping from hip pain.

The only way I see this happening is if I actually commit myself to training better and harder, and the only way that will happen is if I find some kind of way to push myself to go to the gym even when I’m tired, even when I’m worried about how to get dinner to the table on time, even when I know it may mean that I’m bringing work home at night when I’m too tired to think. I still haven’t figured out how to do this, but I have less than 8 months to do it.

What it’s like to be fat

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This story goes back a ways. I think I’ve always been overweight. Back when I was a kid, you were “chubby” or “husky”. These days, you’re “obese” or – if they really want to scare the bejeezus out of you – “morbidly obese”. As if looking at you makes others very, very scared. Really, the only person who needs to be scared is you.

According to the CDC’s BMI calculator, my BMI puts me squarely into the “obese” category. In fact, it suggests that – for someone of my height – I should be about 100lbs thinner. Now, I’m willing to grant the CDC that I need to lose a good chunk of weight, but I can’t shed half my weight without looking skeletal. I know what my body looks like when I’m about 70lbs below where I am…and it’s in the “damn good” category. Take another 30lbs off after that, and I will most likely look like I strolled in from Dachau. There’s something terribly wrong with society when the governmental calculators tell you that you need to be scary thin to be healthy and the clothes manufacturers are “vanity sizing” clothes so that none of us have to feel badly about the fact that our size 16 jeans should really be a size 20.

I was a chubby kid. I had cheeks that everyone seemed to want to pinch. Once I realized I couldn’t see the chalkboard from the back of the classroom, I became the short, fat kid with glasses. It’s like the unholy trinity of suckitude: how to make a kid in the late 70’s/early 80’s as uncool as possible. I had being smart to fall back on; I could write and spell relatively well, and I was good at math. So, the same kids who wouldn’t give me the time of day on the playground also wanted to copy off my homework.

I never felt comfortable being out on the baseball diamond or the soccer field; I grew up encouraged to develop my mind and there was little interest on my part to try to learn how to run that mile, when it seemed like every 1/4mi I ran was enough to set my lungs on fire.

High school got a little better, and being a bit more active (having to take stairs EVERYWHERE, plus aerobics in the a.m. during my senior year) made my frame even out a bit better. Still, I never got below a size 9 – even at my smallest. My senior year, pushing 5’4″ tall, I was around 140lbs when I was at my thinnest point. My mom thought I looked too thin, but I thought I looked good. I was meaty but not fatty, and I felt healthy.

Once college set in, my weight went up and down a little, but it never really settled back that low and it never really got that high. The next time I’d start to get healthy again was when I began hanging out with my friend (who would later morph into Local Kitchen) who I saw wearing these cute skirts all the time. I wanted to be able to wear cute skirts like that. I could never pull off cute skirts like that. So, I hit the gym for the lofty price of $80/mo, and I lost some weight. It was a good time. Even so, it didn’t really last; I couldn’t keep the momentum going, and my weight went up some.

After dh and I got together, my weight fluctuated some more, but it didn’t really go down a lot. When we married, I was probably in the range of 220lbs. There was a point not long after the wedding when I saw the wedding picture of the two of us and was horrified by the width of my body. Sure, my dress started 2 sizes too big – that’s how wedding dresses are; and mine had been taken in quite a bit, anyway. But I just looked enormous.

It was at that point that I went on Weight Watchers. That was the first of two times I’d join WW – online, not in-person. I think I did fairly well, but even the restriction of running out of “POINTS” was stressful. Having kids through me off even further (I had dd in between WW attempt 1 and WW attempt 2). Let me be clear about this, though: my inability to stay on WW was a reflection of ME, not of WW. It’s a great program and it teaches you a ton. I just need more discipline and I need to train my body not to want crap all the time. I also need to retrain my life so that I’m not in a position where the thing within easiest reach and designed most for my lifestyle is the crap. I need to re-do a lot.

I know several people who are doing the “shake” thing, where they drink shakes as meal substitutions, and these “vitamin and nutrition-packed” shakes are supposed to make them feel fantastic and lose weight. The trouble is, you don’t learn how to eat better. You don’t learn how to move more. You just learn how to become dependent upon chemically-designed shakes. That’s not sustainable for me, and it doesn’t help me balance out nutrition intake & exercise for my family, either. After all, this isn’t just about me – this is about how to get us all to a healthier place (putting better food on the table, encouraging everyone to exercise) without putting all the adult anti-fat crap all on the kids so that they grow up with distorted body image issues.

So, when I was asked to join a research study at a hospital near where I work – this research study being about pairing reduced caloric intake with increased exercise to reduce weight – I decided to go for it. I don’t know how much I can talk about the study, and I’ve asked the program director to let me know what I can/can’t say. Otherwise, I’ll just talk in even vaguer generalities about how I’m fighting this personal battle.

At my weigh-in today, my baseline (with clothes on), I was at 216lbs. That’s just awful. It’s not unfixable, though. Hopefully, this study will help me use the next year to get a lifestyle in place that I can manage and that helps me get healthier. It’s not that I need to be a skinny girl. I just want to be a healthy girl. And life sucks as a fat girl. I’m not being down on fat girls, but I know my life would be better if I were a healthy girl, and that’s what I’m aiming towards. I’d like to see if I can get to 150lbs. What’s my timeframe? I dunno. The study suggests weight loss of up to 1-2lbs a week, which is the average in WW and is also considered the average for healthy weight loss. If I can manage that for even 20-30lbs, I think that would make a big difference.

I could use a big difference right about now.