Possibly TMI

Who knew your butt could hurt? How was I supposed to know that buried under all that padding are actual muscles that could get sore?

I've been talking about muscle soreness with my girl who is pushing herself to run in gym class. I really like it, in moderation. It reminds me I'm making progress forward to being stronger.

I don't know what moves specifically we've done in my last two training sessions (bridges?), but that old saw about muscles you didn't even know you had is really manifesting itself!


- iPhone uPdate

Good Sleeping

Maybe its the weather (pleasantly cool at night) but I finally got a decent amount of sleep this weekend. I've been dragging around with consistently less than six hours sleep most nights - which is a combination of staying up too late and then tossing and turning in the middle of the night.

Well, yesterday, according to my magic device, I got more than nine hours of sleep, despite twenty minutes of wakefulness in the middle of the night!  It's not actually true, it turns out. I didn't get that much sleep. It appears that when I lie down to read, my position and my stillness fool the device into thinking I'm actually asleep.

I've been reading more for the past two weeks, with my new Kindle in hand. It's comfortable, convenient, and when I finished my book last night, without leaving my bed I bought two more books from the same author. Oops.

Never-the-less, I think I am getting some decent sleep and I feel better for it. But now time to take my little 4-footed friend for a walk.

More Walking- In Company

The weather has turned from oppressive to mild and we're back to the seasons of walking. I would like to work more walking into my life and currently I'm trying the evenings. But it is getting dark earlier and earlier, so there are several considerations to balance.

Last night I walked for about 45 minutes around our neighborhood. We have widely spaced street lights and narrow twisty hilly streets with no sidewalks. There were lots of cars I had to dodge, but almost no people. I listened to my book and walked very very fast.

I missed having my fierce overprotective dog with me. I have a dog partly just for walking at night. When I got her, part of my criteria was a dog big enough to give bad people second thoughts about approaching us. I am very mindful that I live on the edge of a big city and I am a small woman who could be seen as an easy target.

When we are the only ones on the surface if the planet, my dog is a total joy to walk with. She stays by my left side, sniffing as she goes but keeping that holy grail for dog walkers, a loose leash with plenty of slack - in the eight feet that is all I allow her to range.

This is a very dog friendly neighborhood and it is rare for us to be the only ones out. My own sweet snugglepuss becomes a raging, slavering, mindless ball of lunging snarling fury when other dogs are around. I have worked with trainers and on our own for years, and only reached an uneasy balance that is a lot of work to maintain. I understand her psychology and physiology, and I know how to act. But it is a lot of work to do things right.

I have to be hyperalert to my surroundings. I have to load up my pockets with plenty of high quality treats. I have to react before my dog does, leading her into a positive behavior (eating a treat) before she begins the negative behavior (aggressiveness). And so when it's light out and I feel safe and I'm likely to see many other dog walkers, I often just leave her behind (with a combined sense of guilt and relief).

But if I'm embarked on a new campaign of night walking, it's time to try again. I just didn't feel comfortable on my own last night without her. So tonight, I gave her a try. Nice and easy, no iPod, just around the block. At the second corner, there were some people coming, so we wheeled around and headed back the other way. No anxiety on her part. We ended up doing three circuits, a good 20 minutes, with another reversal to avoid folks.

Dogs are total creatures of habit. If I take her out again tomorrow, by Tuesday she will be expecting it. In a previous decade in a different big city, with a different large dog, I was building up strength for a backpacking trip with night dog walks. Often, what got me off the couch and out in the subzero weather was my dog's unwavering conviction it was the right thing to do. Living up to a dog's expectations makes us better people, and I hope in my case, a more fit one.


- iPhone uPdate

Accountability: Just the Facts

I've not been posting much, and not writing much, because I've not wanted to face the facts. I've weighed myself every day, more or less, and thus maintained an awareness of how well I'm doing. But I needed to sit down and confront the reality, looking at not each individual data point, but what it tells me about trends and today.

Here's the big picture of my weight. The vertical bars are June of each year, and the horizontal ones are ten-pound marks:

It tells me I have lost weight this summer. My feeling was I was holding in place, but my memory of where I was at the beginning of the summer was hazy. It has been painfully slow, and not always in one direction, but overall, I'm better off now than I was.

Here is a better look at where I have been this year - in this one, the horizontal bars are five pounds apart:

I

I am measurably and clearly lower than I was in June!  Not totally stalled, as I felt. However, August was a total bust - I'm where I was at the beginning of the month. The one saving grace is a new number showed up - my first glimpse of a whole pound lower.

Going back to the big picture and historical perspective, I have been here before. I was here in 2008, my last attempt to lose weight. I was here for a long time in 2004 and 2005, a holding action on my way back up after The Big Loss of 1998. It was 2003 - seven years ago - and before menopause for me. My life and my body have been through many changes since then.  Don't know if it was the hormones or what, but I feel like many things I knew about my body then are no longer true. Here's a thought, though - at that time, I was NOT doing a lot of conscious exercise. I bet I am stronger and fitter now than I was then.

Anyway, I'm going to be re-focusing myself on making this line go down. This week, I'm fixed on meal planning and logging all food.

Getting Back to a Routine

The summer was wonderful. I treated myself to several days off, and generally kept to a slower pace. I went absolutely nuts over fruit and it was very very good.  I was a regular at farmer's markets and got a few good vegetables that at least one or two others ate appreciatively.

But now school is in session, my big boy (the best eater) is gone, and the pace at work is insanely fast. The weather is as good as it gets - not too hot, sunny and low humidity - and I like to move. I'll be up before dawn for my exercise session. But I'm eating. And eating. And eating.

Time to get more into a routine.  I do have afternoon help, and she would start supper if I were organized enough to tell her what to do.  That's the rub. It's easy enough to get home and throw something together to eat, but it is at least 45 minutes from when I walk in till when we sit down, and that is late to be eating. So I need to figure out how to set things up to have her prepare something we can eat, or at least go through the first stages of getting it ready.  That means figuring it out in advance, and making sure we've actually got the ingredients. And making sure the kids have left the kitchen in a state where she can work.

Shopping for my house:  Small cups of cottage cheese (I don't eat yogurt, too sweet); frozen dinners (Chicken Tandoori with Spinach; Chicken Tikka Masala), Aidell's Chicken Apple Sausage, Dove Dark Chocolates.  And a 20-pound bag of dog food.  No real food for my house; cooking and most social meals are over with the kids. Think about buying salads to take to work.

I'm not minding the change of seasons and the beginnings of the new school year. I just want things to calm down and feel more normal and routine. I think that will give me the space to manage my consumption better.

The New Normal: I Like to Move

So yeah, I'm eating a lot. But I also am moving a lot, and hardly noticing it.  I just plugged in my armband device and got the stats from this week - college campuses (both Oberlin and Ann Arbor) involve a lot of walking, and my friends here in Ann Arbor love to walk (and they have an adolescent golden retriever that really really likes to walk).

I've averaged over 10,000 steps every day for the past week, my calorie burn has been a respectable 2200 per day, and yesterday I did over 16,000 steps and 2400 calories!  I'm probably still out of balance in my eating (yes, both beer and ice cream are figuring in the mix) but at least the moving feels just perfectly normal, and I'm ready for more. It was specifically to get my energy level up that I started on this exercise journey - I'm getting out there and doing things.

We've already done over 7,000 steps this morning with the morning walk in the woods they do every single morning. (What a lucky dog!)  It was a very slow pace, though over hilly glacial terrain, but its social and pleasant and a terrific way to start the day. Here is what the iphone said we did this morning:

Shortened Google Maps URL: http://j.mp/9LeRQ2
Started: Sep 3, 2010 6:37:39 AM
Walk Time: 1:20:06
Stopped Time: 0:00
Distance: 2.68 miles
Average: 29:52 /mile
Fastest Pace: 20:51 /mile
Climb: 643 feet
Calories: 258


And all by 8 am - with no thought of slowing down for the rest of the day.

Road Food Choices

It's been a stressful time, full of emotion and busyness. I've kept pretty active, but I haven't bothered to think through food choices in advance. As a consequence, I've not been eating too well.  Oh, maybe its too well. I'm not eating bad or indifferent food, just not healthful or portion controlled enough.

In Ohio, there were not a lot of great healthful choices. I had a week's worth of calories in an Oberlin cheese steak, with the thick and hole-ly bread pan fried, and sauteed onions added to the beef and cheese stacked inside, and great slices of home fries on the side. Later, touring the Lake Erie shore, I took a walk and ended with a great ice cream cone by the beach. The next day, it was a hot dog and ice cream cone (and change returned from a five dollar bill!). Today, with a much wider variety of more sophisticated eateries to choose from in Ann Arbor, I got a fabulous fajita steak salad, with fresh corn and radishes and onions and tomatoes and tortilla strips stirred into the mix. Good colorful vegetables, but probably another week's worth of food. Then there was a party tonight, with a buffet, and a beer followed by cake and ice cream after the candles were blown out.

In the midst of all of this, there is lots of walking. Nothing very vigorous, but lots and lots of it. I'm really enjoying the walking, and I did buy two pairs of fabulous comfortable shoes to wear on future expeditions - totally unnecessary, but they make me feel good when I see them.

I'll buckle down again when I get home, but this is a fun interlude.