sarahmichelef | Entries tagged with personal: fitness

I started swimming about a year ago because I was tempted by that mini-triathlon that never actually happened. At first I really didn't like it - I had never enjoyed swimming laps. I would get in and muddle through half an hour or 35 minutes of breast stroke and elementary backstroke, usually about 25 laps. I would try to throw in some freestyle and would find myself floundering in a big way after just a lap or two, so I just stopped doing freestyle.

I slowly started swimming for longer, both in terms of time and distance. 25 laps became more like 30, 30 minutes became 40. My breast stroke, which I think of as slow, made me one of the faster swimmers in the pool - I routinely pass people doing freestyle with my breast stroke. I figured out what was wrong with my freestyle (I was expending FAR too much effort kicking) and I can now do 5 laps of freestyle easily and could probably do more if I paced myself better. I re-discovered the joy of a good backstroke.

About 3 weeks ago I didn't feel done after 30 laps, so I tagged on the 6 more I needed to make it an even mile, and have been doing a mile in about 45 minutes, 2 or 3 times a week. I only did 25 laps today, since I'm still coming off of that stupid cold.

I still don't LOVE swimming. But I don't hate it and since my knee is back to being a pain in the, well, leg, swimming is making up a significant proportion of my exercise these days.

What was it, three weeks ago that I did a trial shamble on the treadmill, just a mile to see how I felt afterwards? Then I got sick, and then I twisted my ankle, so I hadn't been up to another try until Tuesday, when I shambled another mile and felt just fine.

Today, it was 53 degrees when I left the house to go to the gym, and I knew for a fact that the sidewalks downtown were clear of snow and ice. So I SHAMBLED OUTSIDE! I thought, I'll go a mile and half or so...

Apparently my memory of my running routes downtown is very faulty. 2.58 miles. In just over 20 minutes.

My hip hurts. We'll see how it feels tomorrow. The knee feels fine, though, so that's positive.

Apparently what I need to do to have an AWESOME spinning class is a) not be able to go for several weeks (hard to attend an 8:45 fitness class when I have to teach at 8:34 every TTh) and b) turning my ankle on the way to the car in the morning. It's stiff & a little sore and I think when I take my shoe off it's going to swell up like a balloon. Fun!

There is coffee brewing, I should go get some.

But the real reason, the really REAL reason for this post is to tell you about fashion. :^D I haven't blogged about my clothes in a while, but I had a supercute outfit last week that I wanted to document (in writing at least).

light grey pencil skirt
graphic print wrap shirt
charcoal grey one-button blazer
black tights
patent leather wingtip flats

I just hadn't worn anything worth blogging about in ages, don't know why. This weekend we went to the outlets and I got some cute shirts and a pair of supersoft grey cords that I have to lop like 6" off of before I can wear them.

That is all.

Current Location: study
Current Music: Jazz on WBFO

I shambled.

For the first time in SIX MONTHS, I shambled. I strapped on my birthday present (in those colors, too!), got myself on the treadmill, and I shambled. I took it easy ... I limited myself to a mile, at a relatively slow pace (started at 5 mph, worked up to 5.8 over the course of that mile). I could have EASILY gone another mile, which is awesome, considering that I haven't run in half a year. Right now my hip is feeling it just a little; we'll see what things feel like in the morning. If it's OK, I'll go again sometime early next week. And so on, until I no longer feel like a total slacker. Whoo!

I just bit the bullet and signed up for my first official 5K race. I haven't been running much the past couple of weeks, what with twice-weekly spin classes, swimming on Monday mornings, running errands on the bike on Fridays... Went out and did 2.5 miles pretty easily yesterday morning (I felt totally fine, could have easily kept going for a while, coming into the last quarter mile, at which point I decided to kick it into high gear just for fun), though I did not stretch sufficiently afterwards so my hip is sore today. The sore hip is just from running; the sore quads are from the sprint at the end.

Just out of curiosity, I looked at the top 5K times for local women in my age group. Times range from 20:32 to 21:28. To which I say DAMN! World record is 14:11.15. Just TWENTY MINUTES faster than me. No big deal. ;^) My goal for the race is to run the whole thing. I figure if it's fun maybe I'll do it again and try crazy things like going faster than I have previously. The challenge of this one (besides it being my first race ever) is going to be that it is on a weekday evening, when I will have been home with TRex all day so I will possibly be a bit tired to begin with. Oh well, it's the one that fits our family schedule best.

Finally saw Garden State this weekend (M and I had our anniversary chinese take out and a movie Saturday night). Loved it with huge big piles of loving.
In research news, I closed my survey last week and have started coding data. Whoohoo!
The reunion of the original cast of Rent was underwhelming. Am I wrong in thinking that Jesse L. Martin was in the original cast? Because he certainly wasn't on stage last night (but Taye Diggs in glasses and a bow tie? hee! so much adorable!)

Also, we are probably in the minority in America in having felt torn between watching the Tonys and the basketball game. Plus I had baronessmartha telling me I need to watch In Plain Sight as well.

I am feeling very productive today, despite having not actually done much but swim most of a mile.

It is to the point that the only part of swimming which I don't enjoy is dealing with my goggles. I have NEVER liked goggles, but I also really can't stand water in my eyes (like, even in the shower, I can't stand water in my eyes). And the goggles I have, well, I can't go more than about three laps (half a lap of freestyle) before I have water sloshing in my eyes. It's annoying.

We have pretty much decided that we are going to be a public-transit family come fall, as much as we can. M will buy two metro passes through work (pre-tax, whoo!) and we will make use of the handy park&ride lot at UB on a daily basis. So, yay for that.

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... I slept 'til 8:30, lolled in bed 'til after 9, had breakfast, took the shambling zombie out for a 2.5 mile shamble. Now I'm sitting here nursing my water and contemplating a shower... I don't expect the others back for a bit, since they were going shopping for my present this morning. The rest of the day... we have no plans except running to M's office to make use of the departmental copier/scanner/printer/julienne fry machine because I have a document to scan that is substantially bigger than bed on the home scanner.

Happy Mothers' Day to all the Mommies, hope you get to do EXACTLY what you want to today!

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For the first time since I started running, this afternoon I really just didn't want to. The motivation was very much lacking. But it was 60 degrees and sunny, and tomorrow it's supposed to be cooler and rainy, so I had a harder time justifying NOT going outside.

So I went, I started running. My shambling, zombie run. The one that on a normal day moves me at the rate of about an 11.5 minute mile. Except today it moved me at about a 10.2 minute mile, for 2.25 miles. Yeah, the answer to "I don't want to run" is "go and run further than you've run probably in 15 years". We'll see how it feels tomorrow - I'd done one 2 mile run a couple of weeks ago, so it's not that drastically more than I'd done previously.

Running in Elmwood Village is dangerous, too. Makes me want to move out of our nearly-suburban neighborhood down where it's hip and cool. And then I remember that we are not hip and cool and that I like having a garage. So I'll stick to running there and fantasizing. (

meneleth, I've taken to running various routes in the square described by Summer, Richmond, Utica (or sometimes as far North as Ferry), and Delaware (or maybe another block east to Linwood).)

Post-run, I lifted weights and then did 13 minutes on the recumbent bike. Yay, me!

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In bullet list form...

Spent 7 to 7.5 hours yesterday cleaning the house. Am only about half done. But ZOMG the bathrooms are extra-shiny and we have clean sheets & mattress pads and I even rotated our mattress all by myself.
Super Sekrit Projekt going well, very amusing to me. More to come upon its completion.
Put in plastic garden border this weekend. TRex LOOOOVES worms. Loves them, is very gentle with them, moves them from the dirt we just dug up to our perennial bed and then covers them with more dirt.
That 100 bulbs for ten bucks box I bought at Aldi? Totally worth it. Hopefully this weekend will be lovely so we can do some planting.
CF light bulbs are cheaper at Aldi than at Target. PSA and all that.
TRex has eczema, not some other bizarro rash, so yay. Also, 35 pounds according to the ped's scale.
Swimming gets less annoying every time I do it. But oh, freestyle kills me ded. And I do need different goggles... no matter what I do, the minute I start to freestyle they fill right up. And I was very averse to pool water in my eyes even before I wore contacts.
I think it says something about my fitness level that I'm planning to go for a "short" run today. Y'know, only a mile and a half. But, woe, my iPod is out of battery-juice and I didn't have the cable in my bag, so I will be running with ENVIRONMENTAL NOIZE!
Final exam Thursday. Have spent most of today doing the administrative nonsense that goes with it. Now administrative nonsense is all done.
Hooray for webcams and skype, they mean I get to actually SEE Sam instead of just typing at her.
Per the cleaning spree... I have two things warring within me. Thing 1: being thrifty/eco-conscious and not throwing things away willynilly. Thing 2: decluttering, which means occasionally throwing away things that might have been repurposed.

My miscellanea gun, she is out of bullets. In conclusion, I give you a macro in search of a picture.

My mind, you haz blowed it.

Current Location: adjunct cube farm
Current Music: quiet

Whatever issue I was having with my night guard last week (or the week before, whenever it was) has resolved itself and I'm happily back to sleeping very, very soundly with it in. I don't know if there's actually a connection between my sound sleep and the night guard... maybe I'll have to do a systematic study.

I got 2 compliments on my hair today - one from a stranger and one from a friend. So yay on that. I am very much still loving it. It's kinda like my hair was in 11th grade, actually. I'll have to dig up a copy of my junior pic to really compare.

There is only one HP geek in my class. See, I talk about how language creates meaning and use words like "muggle" and "kneazle" and "Voldemort" to illustrate how these concepts didn't even exist until J.K. Rowling made them up. And only one person snickered. I also got to tell the story of

baronessmartha,

mittenydoom, and me accidentally spoiling the book for the poor woman in line in front of us at Wegman's. Poor woman, I hope she's forgiven us.

New gym clothes make me happy. I can totally understand why people live in their workout pants - I got these (in both black and grey) and they are oh so comfy, and they don't look awful. But I know what Saint Tim would tell me if he knew I was considering wearing them anywhere but the gym. I also got this shirt and this one in white & grey. I already have a couple of tank tops, so I'm set in that department, and when spring/summer roll around I'll have to get a couple more pairs of shorts.

Sadly, I managed to forget my snazzy new exercise gloves today and so I had to deal with rings pinching and losing my grip due to sweaty palms. Thursday I will not forget them, but Thursday I won't be doing the Gravitron which is really when I need them most.

Current Location: cold cold basement
Current Music: 11 pm news

First spinning class in six weeks... ouch. My legs were fine, my lungs were not. But damn it felt good.

Our friends S & W got to go to Guatemala to see their baby last week. The pictures made me cry, both because they look so happy and because they had to leave without him (something I would wish on no parent, bio or adoptive). He is an adorable little dude and I can't wait to meet him (and TRex is all excited to give him some of her baby toys when he comes home).

In Flickr dorkiness, this picture of TRex is officially my third picture on Explore. And it cracks me up (the picture, not the being on explore). Also, yesterday she got a big chocolate chip cookie for having a no-pee-accidents day - she's been in big girl undies since Saturday.

Over the past week I've increased my resistance by 5 pounds on almost all of my exercises (chest press, row, lat pull, abs (where I'm working with almost half my body weight!), hip abductors & adductors). This means that my back & shoulders are deliciously sore today - not enough to actually bug me, but enough to remind me that I have been doing good work in the lifting department.

Here's a question for the weight-lifty folks out there... right now I'm doing my bicep curls with 15 pounds and my tricep extensions with 20 (3 sets of 15). I could PROBABLY go up to 25 on the extensions, but I don't think I could go up to 20 on the curls. But my biceps are also getting worked on the row and the lat pulls (at least according to how I feel and the diagrams on the machines). Would it be a bad idea to have a 10 pound differential between my biceps and my triceps? (I'm planning to ask Joseph the Excessively Cheerful Trainer this same question next time I see him.)

Oh, and my engagement ring is too big. Keeps spinning around and stabbing me in the pinky. Woe is me, I know. ;^)

Current Location: home

Spinning class continues to be very enjoyable. Joe tried to kick our asses today, and I kept up just fine. I definitely think my lagging a couple of weeks ago was due to illness. So yay and all that... no class next Thursday 'cause the center's closed for Sukkot, but apparently one of the other teachers is adding a Friday morning session that I may try to make, depending on worky stuff.

I tried a WW experiment this week... Whenever the subject comes up on the forums, I say that I can't eat my weekly points allowance (those 35 extra points we get every week to spend however we want) and still lose. But I thought about it and realized that I don't necessarily have good evidence for that - the last time I tried it, I had a lot of pizza. ;^) So this week I'm eating many more of them and we will see what happens. I expect that my theory will be borne out - I use the Google 15 gadget (yay data) and so far I haven't lost any this week. But who knows, maybe I'll get a surprise on Saturday morning.

The sun is shining and it is warm, and I am sitting on the porch in a nylon butt-sling with the computer on my lap. Hooray. Mark and I IM-conferenced about the paper and have found what I feel like will be good common ground to grow our paper out of. I am industriously looking at my data about blog audiences right now. (Well, ok, RIGHT NOW I'm blogging this here blog. But there are windows and tabs open, and I will be going back to it in just a moment.)

The fabulous

relentlesstoil is insanely, nay, stunningly, nay, the VERY DEFINITION OF fabulousity. And I still think she should slough off work tomorrow and come and "evaluate" my class. Also: Hip, hip, hip-ahhhh!

Got a haircut & eyebrow wax today. Hooray! Also purchased TRex's birthday presents... she's so easy. She asked for a teddy bear (never mind that she already owns about a zillion of them), and we decided that she needs a football. That plus a cute outfit that I liked = 3rd birthday gifts for under thirty bucks. (OK, not counting the tickets to the Wiggles concert next month.) And a box that I know to contain a Thomas the Tank Engine Duplo set just arrived via UPS (from my parents).

Current Mood: warm
Current Music: heatsink hum

Spinning class is still fun. I'm apparently still a bit under-powered after my sickness last weekend, so I wasn't able to work as hard as last time, but it was plenty sweaty. Today I could see the clock, too, which was less torturous than it sitting there taunting me, but at the same time I think I prefer not knowing how much time has elapsed.

TRex loved her first day of preschool. They learned about red things, made collages (yes,

relentlesstoil, school beat me to collage fun...), and played on the playground. When I asked her what she did, she told me, "I had a snack and then I took a nap."

We're switching from DSL to cable modem - they're coming to do the install on the 18th. Shortly after that we are going to do something that we would previously never have considered... ditch the land line. If you've ever talked to us on our landline, you know that it involves a lot of "what? I couldn't hear you!" You would not BELIEVE the buzz that emanates from it - phone conversations are literally painful, as I press the phone to my head as hard as I can in hopes of actually catching what the person on the other end of the line is saying. So it's just going to go away. I'm due for a new cell any day now (my upgrade date was the 4th) and will probably get it this weekend.

Class is going well so far. They have their first quiz tomorrow, so that will give me a better idea of what's going on in their heads, and their first activity write up is due on Monday, which will give me an even better idea.

New Car paranoia is wearing off. But we really need to vacuum the back seat because TRex took off her sand-filled shoes on the way home from school yesterday. I have a feeling that our kid who has usually been bathed every other day or so is going to get bathed every day she goes to school. She was FILTHY yesterday.

master_mr, if you read this, drop me a line - we would love to see you tonight if it fits with your travel plans.

Current Mood: peaceful
Current Location: home
Current Music: quiet

I did a pretty hard workout yesterday. First I ran 1.8 miles in 20 minutes on the elliptical (on the machines that I don't like... but I'd better get used to them since that's all the downtown location has...), and then I did an upper body workout. And I added several things to my upper workout - our gym has the Cybex VR system. Yesterday I added the advanced movement on the chest press (the version of the machine I use isn't on the website) and row/rear delt machines as well as adding the pulldown. I have to be really careful about my right shoulder - I can do the pulldown but I can't do an overhead press - no repetitive overhead motions. I'm trying to get myself into a more complete upper-body workout.

( The reasons for the )

On the other hand, I'm wearing shorts today and I noticed that my calves are really showing my workouts. I've always had really well-defined calf muscles, and right now I'm rocking the "chunk of 2x4 strapped to the back of my shinbone" look. I think my upper legs would have similar definition if I didn't carry so much of my excess weight in my belly, hips, and thighs.

Tummy's a bit on the queasy side, I don't know why. *shrug* Hopefully lunch will help. I have on a casual-but-cute outfit (blue striped thin thermal hoodie, big chunky earrings, Levi's).

My lungs let me really work out yesterday - the usual 20 min elliptical (probably a bit slower than usual - I wasn't actually paying that much attention) and then 15 on the treadmill (at 3.2 mph instead of 3.5). Plus I went to fencing practice last night and worked HARD. I worked with a new girl for a bit, then played with Irene for a while, then Robert (those bouts with heavy rapiers) and then with Berhend (playing light because my arm was pretty tired - I wiped out on some black ice outside the gym and took most of the fall on my right hand/arm - no real damage, but it was a bit tetchy last night). Ber beat the crap out of me, quite literally. I've got a nice 1" long blade-width bruise on the back of my right wrist, a bruise in the crease of my hip joint (I told Ber that if M asked about that one I'd be sure to let him know who was to blame) and a sore spot right above my belly button. It was the hardest I'd fenced in a really long time, and it felt good.

On a very, VERY amusing note: Don Ivan asked me at practice last night (while we were discussing the new girl and who would be a good match for her teacher-wise) if I had an OGR. Spit take, anyone? I said no, and recounted the story of when someone brought my name up in reference to that and

childsplay7 laughed in their face. I hadn't thought about that story in a while. ;^) Ivan's comment, "Well, I dunno, they've made about a billion OGRs since I stopped paying attention to it."

Also: Caleb has apparently poked Grendel about doing paperwork for Irene and me to become marshals. He really needs a backup - Ber can't make practice all the time, Ivan is the only youth marshal so when he's there, he's working with the teenagers. Between Irene and me, someone's at pretty much every practice. Plus, then we can really run the 25-and-under tourney to complement the seniors tourney at Pennsic this year. (Note to self: figure out who's in charge of rapier scheduling this year, and also who's running the senior's tourney.

ferriludant, do you know the answer to the latter question?)

Someone in

flylady pointed out FitDay's free online calorie/activity/etc. tool and I think I'm going to give it a try. WW just doesn't seem to be doing it for me this time around, and this tool has all sorts of charts about where your calories are coming from, where your activity is coming from, etc. I like visuals. A lot. (Bonus: it lists "fencing" as one of the sports activities. Yay!)

Got a haircut & eyebrow wax yesterday - oy, had it been too long. To illustrate:

OK, yeah, maybe I picked the "before" pic to really accentuate the mess. But actually it was the only recent pic I had that actually showed my hair. Anyway. Much happier about the state of things on my head. Plus, I actually managed to make my hair look good this morning despite the fact that it was pretty much vertical when I got up.