Back to "normal"

After a weekend of traveling, a week of playing sleep catch-up, and a weekend of tennis and rain storms, it is back to what passes for normal in my life. It is still raining - we had as much as 5 inches 12 inches in the last few days! - so Miikka may not get a walk this afternoon, but I did make it to the gym for the first time in over a week. I had to drag myself out of bed, for even though I posted last week about being a defiant athlete and wanting to train for a 5K race, it is sometimes still hard to do what I love. 5 AM comes mighty quickly when it is cold and rainy.

At the gym, I started actually training for the 5K, by following a Couch to 5k plan that has been adjusted for the treadmill. Since I only have 5 weeks before the race, I started at week 5. And you know what? It was easy, too easy probably. It only really had me running for 15 minutes, which is less than I was running with my intervals a couple of weeks ago, and although they were in 5 minute increments, I was able to keep up. Actually, I had to tack on an extra 10 minutes at the end, because I had only gone 2 miles, and I am used to going at least 3 when I am on the treadmill. I guess that is OK, and it means I am in better shape than I thought (I tend not to be good at judging my own fitness - what a surprise).

And that is my main criticism of this plan (obviously a well-thought one at that, after one whole session!): I am not sure how they expect you to go 5K in 30 minutes at this stage. Am I not supposed to be going 5K at this stage of the plan? I guess not. I mean, to do that in the time they have you running, you have to run about a 10 minute mile for 30 minutes. I can do that for some of the time, although I don't know if I can yet do that for the whole 30 minutes. I doubt that anyone who is truly coming from couch potato-ness would be able to run that fast, even after 9 weeks of training. They have the running segments ramp up pretty quickly, which again, I don't think someone who is truly un-fit would be able to do.

Hey, it's not perfect, but at least I have a plan to give me some structure. If I have to do more time on the treadmill to get the full distance I am used to, then so be it. That can't really be a bad thing, can it?

A matter of perspective,or it's all relative

As I was leaving the gym this morning at 6:30, after running 3.5 miles and doing a weight routine, I first thought "I wish I could convince myself to do something really crazy hard (to me anyway), like run a marathon or go vegan for a month, just because."

Then I thought, "Most of the people I know think I am already doing crazy stuff for getting up at 5 AM to go to the gym."

Nowadays, I don't think I am crazy for doing such stuff, because one of my cousins has decided to train for an ultramarathon (for more about his running and training, check out his blog), and his brother was almost a Navy Seal and loves Crossfit and working out until he thinks he is going to die, as does their sister's husband (who was also in the Marines and served more than once in Afghanistan). But if last January, when I was first trying to get more exercise and had just started getting up at the early hour of 5:45,  you had told me that I would get up at 5 to go to the gym 3 or 4 days a week, and that it wouldn't feel like enough, I would have thought you were crazy.

I have never really thought of myself as athletic, although one of my favorite activities is hiking, and I love playing volleyball, racquetball and tai chi. I always thought of myself as sort of lazy, physically, not able to really push myself. I am not sure where this came from, except that I guess I bought into the idea at some point that I was more of a bookish nerd than an athlete. I didn't fit in with the athletic kids at school, and I wasn't very good at team sports (partly a problem with being told what to do and getting blamed when the team does poorly, partly I am just a really bad loser - although I am getting better at that). It isn't that I didn't have any role models - my dad played lots of sports while he was growing up and he was always there to play frisbee or go swimming or bike riding or hiking with me, and my mom's dad was a champion football player and track athlete in college, who was playing golf until about a month before he died. He and my grandmother also both hiked the Grand Canyon - after they retired. And even my mom, who I don't think of as liking to exercise that much, was on all the early hikes and bike trips, and spends hours gardening.

Now, as I work on being more mindful and treating myself and others with loving-kindness, I am finally shedding that damaging self-judgment and becoming more fully who I am meant to be. A defiant athlete (who happens to like reading books, a lot of books). It feels amazing.