STAIRS!! (redux)

Remember the hospital stairs?

Something like 323 of them from the 1st floor to the 16th floor?

Ok, I’m not doing 323 these days.   But since hubby HAS been transferred out of ICU (yep, let me say that again – he’s been TRANSFERRED out of ICU!! WOOT!!) he’s back on the 9th floor.

This means I have from 1st floor to the 9th floor (works out to be 9 flights with the maintenance levels in between) to walk up every day I visit him.

Today, I did from the 2nd floor up after lunch with my friend Kathy.

I didn’t stop.

Go ahead.  Re-read that.   Let it sink in for a minute.  I’ll tell you what it means for me after.

…

…

Got it?  I didn’t stop.

That means, that I walked from the 2nd floor to the 9th floor WITH.OUT.STOPPING.

Normally I stop after every 3rd or 4th floor.  Catch my breath.  Let my heart rate slow down.  That sort of thing.

Today, I did it WITHOUT STOPPING!!

WOOT!

Slow and steady wins the race.  And the race is my health  (and my derby skillz )

Stairs are a beautiful thing.  Maybe I can be running up them by the time he comes home…

Blog Name Change

Just so y’all know – I changed the blog name.

In case you get an email and go… WTF???  When did I sign up for THAT blog?

It’s still me, still my blog, but I never did like the name of it, so I found out where I could change it, and did.

Thanks for joining me on my journey

BICYCLE…. Biiiiicycle…

I want to ride my bicycle, I want to ride my bike…

Bicycle Races are coming your way…  (warning there’s naked people in this video… didn’t realize it LOL)

Off for a bike ride with my boys and dogs.  WOOT!

Then to spend the day in my friend’s garden.  She’s awesome and helps me with my garden lots so today I’m helping her

Have a fantastic sunny Saturday everyone!!!

Baby Steps

I’ve been thinking in black and white, all or nothing, go big or go home terms.

Must start an involved program that consists of changing my eating habits, incorporates more water, gets me up at 5.45am to work out, work out, behave, blah blah blah.

All those changes at once.

The problem with that is that I haven’t been sleeping well.  I have had problems falling asleep, and the drugs that my doctor gave me left me unable to wake up early enough, and when I didn’t take them I had a lousy sleep.

My chosen work out time is 6am. I *like* that time of day to work out in. I enjoy the rush of getting my body moving that time of day.

Go ahead, laugh.   I’ll wait…

…

…

Done giggling? No? Ok…

…

…

…

Yes, I am crazy.  Stop that.  I can still see you chortling and trying to hide it.

I like being up early.  I like the first morning quiet when I’m the only one up in the house.  Its a great time to exercise, write, meditate, read, centre myself.  Its fantastic.

But when you don’t fall asleep until 1 or 2am… waking up at 5.45am is… difficult.

When your life is in chaos, routine gets lost.

When stress is the overwhelming influence in your life, you lose your sense of which way is up.

So here I’ve been hard on myself because I don’t have a good routine and I haven’t been getting up to exercise and I’ve been eating crap and…

Wait.  Hold the boat!

My husband is in hospital (transferred out of ICU yesterday!!! WOOT!!!) has been in ICU/hospital for the past EIGHTEEN WEEKS, and I am not doing enough for my exercise and weight loss program.

Yeah.  That’s fucked up (pardon the language)

I barely have a new normal routine for my CHILDREN never mind myself.  I barely have enough energy to make sure they’re on track never mind focus on what I need.

It’s ok. It’s perfectly ok that for the past 18 weeks, I’ve lost my routine.  It’s more than ok.  It makes sense.

Here we are now, 18 weeks in and I have a new normal with the kids. I have a *somewhat* workable routine with them (instituted this past week!!) that keeps them on track.

My turn.

I’m starting with baby steps.

I have, for the past 2 days, gotten up with my alarm at 6am. Not 7, not 7.30, not 5am because I couldn’t sleep, but 6am.  Not only that, I’ve been in bed between 10.30 and 11pm.

The start of my workable routine for ME is to go to bed and get up at a reasonable hour.

Next step, next week, will be to add some exercise to that.  But for now, I just want to go to bed, then get up at a reasonable time.

Because if I can’t – then the rest of the *routine* is useless.

Baby steps.

Oh and in case you missed it – yesterday my husband was transferred out of ICU.  He’s now on the 9th floor – no more reason for me to miss doing my stairs

Happy Friday everyone!

Frenemies

Reblogged from 100 Pounds in 1 Year:

“Frenemy” (alternately spelled “frienemy”) is a portmanteau of “friend” and “enemy” that can refer to either an enemy disguised as a friend or someone who’s both a friend and a rival.  The term is used to describe personal, geopolitical, and commercial relationships both among individuals and groups or institutions. The word has appeared in print as early as 1953.  – from Wikipedia…

Read more… 1,080 more words

I found this blog today - something I wanted to share with my readers... Is food my enemy? The chocolate cake I shared with my family for my son's 12th birthday tasted good - the temptation to eat more (because there is still half a cake left) is not overwhelming, but in the past its just been a matter of eating until I couldn't move... so is food my frenemy?

GPS Didn’t Help and I Don’t Have A Map

I got lost for a while.

The joys of depression, the chaos of trying to find a new routine in my life, buying into stories I’ve told myself, all contributed to losing my way.

It’s hard to tell sometimes what is depression (and less controllable) and what is just buying into bullshit.

I have accepted a victim role for a long time.  I have accepted that I am a smaller person, less important, less smart, less worthy for a long time.

On a side note, I think that’s cost me some potentially awesome friendships.  I can’t be sure, and I’m hoping that there’s still time to build those friendships, but the feeling is there.

So it’s hard to tell if I’m falling back into the habit of being less than, not good enough and allowing myself to get caught up in the victim role, or if the depression is just that overwhelming.

I haven’t done any formal *exercise* in the past 2 weeks.  I haven’t gotten up early enough to work out, I haven’t done the stairs at the hospital, I haven’t gone to roller derby.

However, I’ve decluttered a portion of my house, moved some furniture between floors, and finished my greenhouse (I have plant babies!!! YAY!!)

But I got lost.  I stopped asking my friend to let me know when she’s going for a walk/run, I stopped caring what I ate, and I stopped drinking water.

I stopped blogging.

I read another blog that talked about following your passion. Doing something that fires you up, that you’re excited to get up in the morning.

I realized I don’t have much passion.  Is this depression? Or is it just my life?   Again, I’m lost.

Does anyone have a map?

Time to make small changes.  I need to take a few steps in a different direction – the path I’m following.  The path I’m following will keep me lost.

The fun is trying to figure out which way I’m going.  I certainly don’t like the path I’m on, and I don’t like the destination I can see in front of me, and I’m not going back to where I came from (I’m pretty sure that they’re the same place LOL)

I’m going to try to live by this:

And start today with a bit of motivation.  I still love bodyrock.tv, but my focus will be on more roller derby specific workouts from this website.

Along with cross training of taking the dogs out for a run, riding bikes with my boys, doing my stairs and some fun video games (my kid gets a kinect for his birthday today!!), I’m going to motivate myself every day to just do something.

I’m going to create a plan, create a path that I want to walk on, and look for my daily motivation to get there.

After all, its about the journey Not the destination :p

Core Exercises

I’ve posted about this before, the unintended core exercises.  I’ve posted about how I’ll be doing something with no intention of *exercising* or *working out* and find that I’m sore all over.

Today’s random exercise-that-is-not-an-exercise:

Moving dirt.

Seems simple enough.  Take the 3 cubic yards of dirt that was dumped on my driveway (front right corner of my yard) and move it to my garden (back left corner of my yard).

My yard is big.  I basically had to walk around my 2400 square ft house from the front corner to the opposite back corner.

Carrying buckets of dirt.

Over.  And over.  Until my neighbor took pity on me and loaned me his wheelbarrow (note to self:  ask for a wheelbarrow for Christmas, my birthday or Mother’s Day.  Although our wedding anniversary is coming up next – perhaps for then)

Then I did another 10 loads of dirt.  At least.

I ended up moving 2 cubic yards of dirt.

I hurt.  All over.  I hurt so much that at 11.30pm, I’m not sure I could handle a shower.

My back, my hips, my quads all got a REALLY good workout today.

OH! And I have my greenhouse finished and the garden almost filled with dirt  WOOT!

It was a good day for exercise.  I’m going to crawl into bed now and hope I wake up less sore… :p

Knowing when to Stop

There was a song I grew up listening too from Kenny Rogers…   The chorus talks about knowing when to stop, knowing when to walk away.

Sometimes I don’t know when to stop or when to say “enough”

Sometimes I have warring pressures in my head… the one that says “Stay, you’re letting people down, you’re a failure, you could push yourself harder, you could do it, you should just keep GOING”  And the other that says “Ummm dumbass, if you don’t stop, you will hurt yourself MORE and you won’t be able to do anything later”

One says take care of myself, the other says push myself.

Both are very important pressures in my life.  I need the one that says to push myself.  I need to listen to that.  I also need to listen to the one that says to take care of me because NO ONE ELSE WILL.

No one else will say “hey – you look like you’re in pain – stop skating”

No one else will say “hey – I can tell you’re over doing it – go rest”

No one else will.  Only I will.  And I need to give myself permission to say “IT HURTS.  ITs time to STOP.” and go home and sit on my couch and try not to feel like I’ve failed.

I’m taking care of myself.   I refuse to feel guilty about it.  Even though internally, I am having an argument about it.

It’ll be ok.

I think.

Having Fun

One thing that often gets forgotten when pushing towards a goal, is how to have fun with whatever the goal is.

We can get so goal oriented, so focused on the prize, that we forget why we started in the first place.

Somewhere along the way we lost the sense of fun.

This has been happening for me in roller derby.  I’m so focused on the goal of *passing the skillz test* that I forgot that skating is FUN.

Yes, there’s a great feeling as I master skills.  Yes, its fantastic that I’ve stuck with the goal this long under really crappy circumstances.

But skating is FUN.

There was a public skate last night.  Open arena, music, 4 adults and 3 kids.  Skating.

I skated with my boys.  I skated with a couple teammates.  I skated with a friend.  I practiced skills.  I pushed myself for 5 minutes. I cruised along.  I stopped for water, stopped for chatter and then skated again.

I’m reminded of the scene in the Cutting Edge (I can’t find a clip to it, if I do, I’ll post it) where D.B. Sweeny is telling Moira Kelly how someone took a picture of him smelling the ice.  How he loves the ice, loves skating.

Moira Kelly’s character is so focused on the goal of gold medal that she forgets to enjoy the experience.

I’d forgotten to enjoy the experience of skating.  I’d forgotten to enjoy the feeling of stretching my body, pushing my limits with no goal in sight other than *have fun*

I forget about that in a lot of different areas of my life.  I get so focused on the destination that I forget to enjoy the journey.

Last night was fun.  I enjoyed the experience of skating with my boys and friends.  It reminded me of when I was a kid, and we’d go to the public skate and just skate for hours.  It was fun.

How Far Can I Push It?

Personal boundaries are made to be pushed. There’s a lot of things I can push… but I wonder how far I can push this one particular thing.

What I’m talking about is the upper weight limit of the elliptical in my basement.  It’s upper weight limit is 250lbs.  I am 255.5lbs.  (lost another 3lbs! WOOT!)

By the way – this is the lowest weight I’ve been in recent memory – at least a year or more. Possibly 2.  I got rid of the previous tracking system I had.

So I have this beautiful elliptical in my basement.  Its been sitting there for 3? 4? years.  It was given to me by a friend when they moved to St. Louis, with the caveat that if I wanted to get rid of it, it would go back to her.

I’ve been holding on to it, and since it didn’t work for my hubby, and I was above the upper weight limit (significantly!) I sorta “gave up” on using it and when she was coming back to Canada, I offered it back to her.

She said sure, but that she didn’t yet have a place to put it and I said that was fine, it could stay where it was until she was ready for it.

So now… I’m within 5lbs of the upper weight limit.   And its very tempting.

Can I use it?  Should I use it? Should I dare, given that its not technically *mine* anymore?

I don’t know.  I don’t want to break it.  LOL

There’s a lot of realizations coming to me about how I’ve held myself back with the “I can’t” and “I’m scared” thought processes.  I’m slowly discarding them one by one, but the realization that it was all *ME*; that I’m the only thing holding me back… I’ve heard it, I’ve read it, but its never sunk in… And now…