Posts Tagged ‘motivation’

Top ten current faves from Greatist

Posted: September 17, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Inspiration, Motivation, Obesity, Weight Loss
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Peanut Butter Cookie Batch

Peanut Butter Cookie Batch (Photo credit: Greatist): I can’t stand peanut butter, but maybe some of you crave it.

I love Greatist. I encourage anyone interested in health, fitness and weight loss to subscribe to them. No, I have no financial or personal interest in them, so feel free to take it or leave it with my blessing and no effect on my pocketbook:

  1. How to foam roll like a pro
  2. Can you be too sore to work out?
  3. 10 interval training mobile apps to download right now
  4. News: Talk to yourself to stay motivated
  5. Schedule your day to reduce stress
  6. Give in to cravings to avoid binges
  7. Ultimate guide to good posture at work
  8. Develop a routine to improve sleep
  9. Why do I eat when I’m not hungry?
  10. How to handle criticism like a pro

There seems to be a “routines” theme in my list. Maybe I’m trying to tell myself something. I’m not even touching the word “pro,” given that I’m a woman old enough to remember that as a euphemism.

Team Octopus or: How to squeeze through the pressure

Posted: June 18, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health
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Reflecting on the pressures I feel while navigating through the challenges of escaping my poor health/fitness condition, I wondered if it was anything like what a 600 lb. octopus felt when squeezing through a hole the size of a quarter.

The ability of the octopus to compress like that could reasonably be considered a survival mechanism, although I can’t seem to locate any authority that states the reason for the behavior. Makes sense, though: Why else would you scoot through an unreasonably small opening, if not to get away to live another day? Or, to twist the question into the shape I’d like it to take, why else would you put yourself through all this pressure and/or pain except to stay healthy?

The other question I can’t find an answer for is whether this is painful for the octopus. Granted, it’s hard to ask them to rate their pain on a scale of 1-10, but their physiology should suggest whether it would be possible for the compression to cause pain.

This all came to me when I was joking about meeting the four horsemen of the apocalyptic workout–the day that makes you want to end all exercise forever.

I’d had a workout that left me sobbing in pain and frustration: changing my dosage and timing on one of the medications to prevent migraines had made me light-headed and light-sensitive, so I was doing my workout in the shade in sunglasses…and with my eyes closed whenever possible. Every squeak of the equipment and sound of the timer going off put my teeth on edge. I had flash migraines, where it felt like someone had shot me in the left eye with an arrow, but only for a few seconds at a go. I was cranky, because the changes had disrupted my sleep schedule.

Unrelated to the medication change, I was cramping in my left quad and gastroc. My body seemed to be screaming at me to quit, assaulting me on all fronts. I felt rather like the one time I’d had sunstroke, just before I passed out. And then, the crowning blow was a simple hamstring stretch.  This is usually the “ahh” moment, as I’m almost done and everything left to do is on my back on a nice foam mat.

Pain exploded in my right quad, radiating to my hip. That’s when I started crying. As I said before, pain for a purpose, to achieve a goal, is one thing, but there’s no sense in suffering needlessly. And, as often occurs, I began doubting whether I would ever progress.

The same thing happened for the next three workouts. I felt like I was squeezing my fat ass through a teeny hope, pressured by pain and fear. My husband felt a big knot in my quad. I set up for an early appointment with Stephanie the phenomenal PT, but, in this case, early meant five days away rather than three weeks.

In the meantime, Gary was rolling the knot. Foam rolling is the best way to do this for yourself, but it’s really difficult for me to get the balance right for most of these, so we’ve taken to using a rolling pin over the area. As I’ve mentioned before, muscle knotting is common in people with fibromyalgia. Usually neither Gary nor I can find the knots, although massage and/or physical therapists seem to put their fingers on them immediately. This one was big enough for him to find.

So we looked up how to deal with knots in muscles. The instructions basically said (in all the sources we could find) to stretch the knot away from the contraction. Since we had no idea how to figure out which way it was contracted, Gary and I decided to go with rolling along the same direction as the muscle fibers. Turns out that was the right idea, and that, yes, until you’ve had a lot of hands-on training, figuring out which direction it should be stretched isn’t that easy for most people.

So he put some pressure on the rolling pin and ran it up and down the knot, the IT band and the hip. I concentrated on breathing like I was in a Lamaze class (although when applied to childbirth, I gave up and asked for the epidural) so the crying incident would not be repeated.

The rolling (and some anti-inflammatory OTC meds) helped, but I dreaded the hamstring stretch each and every day after the first time my quad screamed. On something like the fourth workout after this ghastly newcomer showed up, I had finished the hamstring stretch and was into the piriformis stretch (which you do by pulling your knee toward the opposite shoulder) and there was something like a pop where the knot had been, a burning sensation, and then an immediate reduction in the pain.

Ahh. Is that what the octopus feels once it’s out of the hole?

Pain and other challenges: The big reboot

Posted: June 5, 2012 in Exercise, Fitness, Health, Obesity
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I alluded to my recent health issues (well, more than “alluded” in some) in recent posts: Pain and other challenges, Pain and other challenges: Part 2 and Pain and other challenges: Part the third.  The problems kept piling up, and the key feature to improvement, consistency, has eluded me. I think I’m now on the way to surmounting the problem.

One of the issues that is only tangentially about me is that my migraine specialist, Dr. Robert Nett, died in a car accident back in February. His death was a loss to the medical community, as he was both a researcher and a practitioner, an M.D. and a pharmacist, and very attentive to his patients. It was, of course, even more of a loss to his family and friends, but I’m sure all of his patients felt the loss as well.

I found out when in a different specialist’s office. I’d listed Dr. Nett as the doctor treating me for migraines, and the doctor’s assistant asked me a couple of times who was taking care of that. I repeated the answer a couple of times, a bit confused. Then she realized I hadn’t been told.  When she told me, my first thought was “What a waste!”  My second was “His poor family.”  And my third, I’m a bit embarrassed to say, was “What will I do now?” Selfish much?

But there’s been some validity to the concern. I’ve been heavily medicated to prevent the migraines, and I was developing some sporadic and odd side effects. He had planned to reduce them at some point after they’d done their job of resetting the sensitivity of my brain to stimuli. However, you basically had to audition to get an appointment with him because he was in such high demand. Now that he’s gone, pretty much everyone here in San Antonio that specializes in migraines is slammed and we’re looking at, ohh, August, maybe, before I actually see one of them.

So my internist (whom I’ve called “wonderful” several times, and realized I use “wonderful” way too often, so let’s say she’s amazing — because she is) has been temporarily dealing with my migraine meds as well as my grab bag of assorted illnesses. I had an appointment with her because of a hacking cough I couldn’t shake and managed to have one of the side-effect “spells” that  periodically plague me. I won’t bore you with the details, but she sent me straight to the ER, and on the follow-up appointment said that I was acting as if I’d “had three bottles of tequila, and [she] knew [I] hadn’t done.”

So what with the actual migraines, the recurrent hacking cough, and the spectrum of light-headed to stoned beyond belief, I’ve been extremely inconsistent with my exercise.

So at said follow-up, I talked to her about reducing all of the drugs to zero and asked her if she thought I was being overly simplistic in thinking that diet and consistent exercise would take care of the problem. She nixed reducing everything, even over a lengthy period of time, and pretty much told me I could expect to be on X, Y and Z for the rest of my life. On the other hand, she was in favor of reducing to eliminating some of them.

But we both knew that the ones that were first on the chopping block were those which were preventing the migraines, as they’re also the ones probably responsible for my problems. So I kept thinking, well, what about the exercise if I’m in the middle of a migraine?

She did agree that exercise and weight loss would/could eliminate (or at least ameliorate) most of my medical issues. But I was stuck on the “How can I be consistently exercising if I’m having all these problems?” and not expressing it well and we kind of went in a circle for a bit.

It took me a while to formulate the right question (because of all the foggy brain problems), but I finally came up with it: Is there any reason I should stop if I’m having a migraine, feeling wobbly or hacking like crazy — or do I just need to suck it up?

She smothered a chortle (or at least that’s what I think it was), and said, “Well, basically, yes. Suck it up.”

Fair enough. My fear has been that I’ll make things worse. Now, if necessary, I’ll go workout with my earplugs and sleeping mask, and if it makes any one migraine worse, I’ll deal. I plan on having the hubby coach on standby, of course, but as far as the pain, well, it’s just pain. I don’t mind suffering in the short term if, in the long term, I’ll actually get better.

So, sports fans, the race is back on.

Motivational pic via George Takei

Posted: June 3, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health
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Pretty much stands on its own (click on pic to go to George Takei’s Facebook page):

About “ditto” repost: Do labels matter?

Posted: June 2, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Health
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I reposted the Greatist Graphic that I originally posted about a year ago because I was looking at it to evaluate whether I would consider what I do now High-Intensity Interval Training…or if I could consider what I do CrossFit.

I guess it depends on how you view it. The level of exercise I’m doing certainly has sections that, for me, are aerobic, although others would find them no more challenging than getting off the couch. My current exercise regime is, however, anything but quick.

On the other hand, I came across Kelly Starrett’s blog, MobilityWod, which I’ve added on the resources to the left. I’ve mentioned him in earlier posts, as he’s a fairly well known within the CrossFit community as a physical therapist who is a CrossFit trainer (among other things). Anyway, I came across the following statement from Kelly:

I’ve long maintained that you are an infinite healing machine, at any age, forever.  This simple equation reads:  Right Lifestyle + Right Movement = Perfect Healing/Adaptation Human Machine.

That doesn’t necessarily address how you define CrossFit or High-Intensity Interval Training, but it does hit the basic point: Whatever you call it is irrelevant (except to the extent that it may indicate the philosophy of the particular program), the point is being consistent, addressing your shortcomings and doing the best you can.

The quote comes from a post called “Measuring Lifestyle and Nutrition,” which includes, in the first video (from YouTube, below), a discussion of personal biology and performance between Kelly and Jim Kean. The sound quality is a bit poor, and the conversation wanders a little, but it touches on what you can and cannot control and that there is always hope, as long  as you’re working at fixing the problems.

Pain and other challenges, Part 2

Posted: May 16, 2012 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness
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So, gentle readers, all that I mentioned yesterday happened at the end of last year.  I’d written that post back in January on a good day. They were pretty infrequent, so I put off posting until I had something more encouraging to report (at least in the end).

Just before Christmas, things got even worse, although, for once, the injury was completely not my fault. The water heater decided to lay a trap for me. Our washer/dryer is in the garage and the water heater is just beside the door from the kitchen to the garage. We’d been in and out during the day. My mother was coming in for Christmas, and, an hour before we were to pick her up, I went out to the garage to get some laundry out of the dryer.

I was sitting in the puddle at about the same time I realized I’d fallen. I didn’t feel anything at first, which alarmed me a bit because all of the worst injuries I’ve had in my life didn’t hurt right away (unlike a paper cut, which is a dramatic little screamer).  I fell hard enough my husband heard it reverberate through the concrete (the same thing happens when anyone drops a weighted barbell in the garage). I was able to get up; nothing broken.

But it made the fibro critter incredibly pissed off. By Christmas day, I couldn’t lift my arms to brush my own hair. Overwhelmed with pain and frustration, I think I cried pretty much every day for at least a week. (Of course, there’s always menopause to blame).

Let me digress for a second. Fibromyalgia is one of many syndromes that result from neurochemicals getting crosswise with each other. Dr. Wonderful  told me that it, along with migraines, crop up because your brain is hypersensitive to various stimuli. Given all these interactions, the chronic migraines returned in force. All my medications were upped. Whee.

And the migraines receded, but I was still so crippled by pain that walking or standing was a challenge. I went to my internest, and she checked me out and said, “Well, there’s nothing more I can give you because of all the medications you’re already on.”

Argh. One of those moments where your heart drops and you think you’re doomed.

But then she sent me to back to Stephanie, my ever-so-awesome physical therapist, giving her pretty much a free hand to deal with my fibromyalgia as needed (I think it’s technically “assess and treat”).  The first few visits were murder. I’d cry during the therapy, which, although I freely admit in writing that I cry over stuff, I rarely cry in public. It’s pretty ingrained that crying in public is an invitation to abuse. I don’t like being that vulnerable; generally I hole up when I’m in pain. (Which is another reason I haven’t posted in ages).

One of the things that fibromyalgia can do (or is responsible for creating fibro–the experts won’t agree) is create knots in your muscles:From http://www.aidmyrotatorcuff.com/rotator-cuff-tendonitis-injury/trigger-points-and-the-rotator-cuff.php

I’m not endorsing the site that created this image; it’s a nice illustration, though. I don’t know enough about it to give an opinion. However, I’ve been warned by several doctors (some friends of the family, some treating) to be careful when choosing treatments for fibromyalgia; just like any other chronic ailment, there are some treatments that are possibly useful, but not scientifically studied and others that are downright hokum.

So you’ve got this contracted muscle. It’s freaked out and won’t relax. Notice the biceps in the illustration below from Human Locomotion at Connexions:

When the bicep contracts, it bulges in the middle and strains at the insertion point. When this goes on for too long, it begins to become inflamed. So it’s a bit of both happening all at once. The trick is to convince your body that it’s okay to relax.

Physical therapy has helped. I have to spend a couple of hours a day doing home exercises to improve; at least an hour to stay even and start going downhill if I miss a day. Unfortunately, I still have days with migraines and the fibro flare still makes its presence known. My social life consists of seeing health care professionals and my immediate family members.

Among the various discussions about what I could do in the way of working out, squats came up. At the physical therapist’s location, I was doing squats on a Total Gym. Basically, it takes the load off the knees but allows you to do the same motions as a squat, leading to an exchange that went something like

“So, can I start doing air squats at home?”

“No.”

“I mean after I’ve improved.”

“No.”

“After I’ve lost weight?”

“Which part of ‘no’ are you not getting?”

[laugh; pause]

“Never?”

“Not with your knee.”

Bummed me out. She went on to explain that if I didn’t do every single squat perfectly, I’d end up reinjuring myself. She agreed with CrossFit’s position that it takes several years to master the squat. I’m in a situation in which the arthrogenic (read: Getting Old) changes in my knee won’t allow me to go through the learning process.

However, SCALING still applies. So I’ve got a new toy. CrossFit isn’t big on equipment, but for those of us who are overweight and aging, sometimes you need something to scale down lower than zero weight. (Again, I’d like to put a fat suit weighing a hundred pounds on some of these guys and say, “Go ahead. Do a friggin’ air squat.”)  I got a home version of a Total Gym, although not the trademarked one. My husband did the comparison shopping and we invested in a Jillian Michaels Body Shop. It’s not nearly as sturdy as the one at the therapist’s office, but it’s at least one-tenth the price.

So far, I’m only using it to do the squats (in 8 minute stretches) and working at the pullups. I use the next to the lowest setting, which allows you to do the exercise carrying less than your total body weight.  I’m having to accept that I will max out on what I can do with squats, and weighted squats are a no-go for me.  Running is also off the table.

But that doesn’t mean I can’t work toward other goals.  For me, I’d define it as wellness, a bit shy of the CrossFit fitness model. More on that in the next post.

Knowledge, belief and silence

Posted: October 6, 2011 in Exercise, Fitness, Health, Obesity
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I know I’ll age until the point at which I die, knowledge which causes fear and loathing at times, and not just in Las Vegas.

But do I believe it?

What do I mean? Let’s start with this: I once heard a preacher (I wish I could remember which one; he deserves the credit) make a rather provocative statement that resonated with me both then and now: Most people who would hold themselves out as Christians are practicing atheists. He went on to comment on how what we say we believe should be reflected in how we behave. At the time, I thought of it as a rather clever way of reframing the classic judging trees by their fruit.

But it has meaning beyond a religious context. What we believe does come out in how we act. Some people only believe based on what they’ve experienced; some are able to believe based on the word of others. Most of us are a mix. I don’t have to be smacked in the face with a crowbar to believe it would hurt, but I do have to have enough experience with any particular individual before I will trust past a superficial point.

So back to aging and death: Do I believe they’re real? My actions for most of my life would indicate I haven’t believed in aging, not really. I’ve watched many close family members die, in childhood, middle adulthood and old age, but that’s not the same as dying yourself. When it comes to dying, I think it’s rather like having children: You see other people doing it, you hear them talk about it, but it’s not until you have your own that you really get it. My father once said that he thought dying was kind of like being born: You manage to get through the first without a clue of what’s on the other side, so you’ll probably manage to get through the second.

But I was convinced, perhaps because of my much younger sister’s death at the age of four (I was fifteen), that I wouldn’t live past 21. Then 30. Then after I got through both of those goalposts, I thought it would be right after I turned fifty, which was my father’s age when he died. So I didn’t really believe I would age, and didn’t actually take care of my body as if it were a longterm investment.

Then I got past fifty earlier this year, and the additional month thereafter within which my expiration date should have come up if I were to follow in my father’s footsteps. And now I finally believe I will age before I die. I finally believe I should take care of this vessel in which my consciousness is housed, and chew on old bones of “if I’d only” on a regular basis.

I came to an epiphany and realized I could still change the trajectory of my health and fitness. Hence this blog. But coming to believe that exercise and lifestyle changes will be successful has been a challenge, no matter how much I “know” that is true.

Part of it is because I didn’t used to believe you could learn to be physically fit. Sounds absurd, right? I knew, from a long time ago, that Howard Gardner’s  multiple intelligences theory included physical/kinesthetic intelligence among the types of intelligence there are. But it had been presented in the context of “how to help your students learn by assessing their strengths,” not in the sense that it could be taught. People are naturally better at some things than others; these include which intelligences are their strengths. The first test I took assessed my physical kinesthetic intelligence at practically nonexistent. I was not surprised.

On the one hand, I believe anyone without specific disabilities to the contrary can learn to write and reason to some level of competency. Not everyone can be, oh, say Zora Neale Hurston (just reread “Their Eyes Were Watching God,” and struck again by the beauty of her imagery), but clear and simple writing is within grasp for anyone willing to work at it. Some have to work harder than others, but all writers, even the very best, have to practice their craft.

But, for some reason, I could not apply that same belief to physical fitness and ability until recently. I knew that exercise and eating right would make you healthier. But I didn’t believe I could do it. I didn’t have the skills, didn’t think I could obtain them, didn’t believe I could be successful. The epiphany arrived, and I believed. I demonstrated that belief through actions. But, like any belief, it faces challenges.

Silence, of late, spoke very loudly of my long, dark teatime of the soul in which I have had serious doubts about my relatively new belief. When I’m nervous, I babble far more than the proverbial brook. When I’m frightened, depressed or full of doubt, I shut down and shut up.

My knee was the start. I’m sort of in limbo at the moment: The radiologist and the orthopedic surgeon have yet to come to a consensus about what the MRI actually said. I may have a small tear in the back of the meniscus, I definitely have edema in and around the knee cap (patella). I may have a bone spur at the top of the patella. I was sent off to physical therapy with a “well, we may have to do surgery, but even that may not fix it.” And, to boot, I’ve got arthritic changes in my knee.

The orthopedic surgeon also told me I needed to lose weight. Really? And here I thought I had a gift for stating the obvious.

Well, crap. So I have been rather half-ass at keeping up with my workouts, even though I’m cleared for upper body ones. Why? Because this has thrown my belief into doubt. Can I actually fix my body? Is it really too late? I’d think about paraplegic athletes, or the amputees, and think, now, Jodi, come on: Other people have far more challenges than you do and do more with what they have. But that’s thinking, not believing. The first challenge is to transform what you know into what you believe and then into what you do.

The amount of control we have over our lives is distressingly small. That’s the second challenge: To stay optimistic about what you can control and not be overwhelmed by that which cannot be controlled. Sort of a corollary to Reinhold Niebuhr’s “Serenity Prayer”:

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference.

Perhaps for me, it is “the optimism to believe I can change the things I can and the courage not to be overwhelmed by those I can’t.” Silence is not always serenity. It’s often a very deep place to think loud and dangerous thoughts. And listen to old patterns of thinking, temptations to revert to old and familiar beliefs: Eating that ice cream will make you feel better, you’ll never really be able to lose the weight (have you seen the statistics?), every time you’ve lost weight you’ve put it back on…blah, blah, blah.

So now I’m speaking (okay, for you literalists out there, writing) again. What’s changed?

I’m not entirely sure. Things got a lot worse before they got better. I started having muscle spasms, the painful, charlie-horse kind, on my good knee, waking me from a deep sleep last weekend, which ended up spreading over all the major muscle groups. It’s been coming and going since then. I went to my wonderful internist, who is concerned the spasms may be symptomatic of drug-induced liver dysfunction. That would most likely be from the wonder drug that’s kept my migraines at bay, and if it is, I’m facing a long period of getting off that drug and then trying  out something new, with the distinct possibility of finding the semi-permanent migraine making a reappearance.

I tried to walk with the nice new knee sleeve/brace I’ve got, and ended up wanting to cry. I went ahead and did the upper body workout, and the spasms decided to join me. Took forever to get through the workout and had a bunch of swelling afterward. Was this doing something good, or was I just injuring myself more?

Today I saw my physical therapist, Stephanie Thurmond, the one who I quoted once before as saying “There’s no time off for good biomechanics.” She poked and prodded, as must needs be, and told me I had calcium build-up in the tendon over the patella and that my inner quadricep was weak, even though the rest of my leg had decent strength in it.

And then there was the good news: Both of those problems can be fixed. I have my handout of things to do twice a day.

I think that’s what gave me a change of heart. Stephanie gave me something that was within my control. I can do these exercises, I can improve, I can get back to working out. We discussed walking; she told me if I was swelling, to reduce the intensity and increase the time. We discussed the various upper body things. No problem. No squats until she gets to see them. Can do.

Recognizing what I can do: check. Now I need to put a check next to what I am doing.

To ask the right question

Posted: September 21, 2011 in Exercise, Fitness, Health, Obesity, Weight Loss
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As an educator, when I’d ask about the problem a student was having in one of  my community college classes, I’d be frustrated by their inability to articulate where they got lost along the way. “I don’t understand,” they’d say, and then be offended when I asked a fundamental question, trying to figure out wherein confusion lay.

So when I read Adam Bornstein’s recent post at LiveStrong, I was sympathetic to what he said in “The Most Common Fitness Mistake“:

So it should come as no surprise that asking the right questions is the spark you need to create the type of life transformation that seems improbable. But with fitness, nutrition, and health, most people always ask the wrong question to the wrong person. The catch?

Before looking outward, you need to ask one question of yourself. Is there more that you can do for your health?

You see, when it comes to how you eat and exercise, the questions you ask typically focus on if you’re making an effort— not how much effort you contribute.

Then I saw the comments. People complaining, most succinctly expressed by one who said it was “a whole lot of nothing.” Ironically (oh, let’s not get into an argument whether this is the proper usage), they were making Bornstein’s point for him. Implicity, it was “tell me what I want to know” without doing the harder work of figuring out what I need to do, or what questions I should ask. Where am I getting lost? What else can I do?

In a sense, no one teaches another; we all teach ourselves. Others can share their knowledge with us, but if we don’t have anything to hook that knowledge onto, something we already know, then it’s useless to us. My son and daughter-in-law are physics majors, and they’ll sometimes try to explain some cool new concept to me. I’m interested, but it’s hard for them to get it across to me in all but the sketchiest of terms. And then my daughter-in-law will say, wisely, that it’s hard to explain a concept it’s taken three years of classwork to be able to understand herself.

My husband has talked to me about CrossFit for years, but it never really made sense to me until I got out there and tried it. I still was easily overwhelmed with information. I can now take a little more information about where I’m going, but I often have to get him to “dumb it down” for my level of fitness, coordination, agility, et al.

Is there more I can do for my health? I’m going to get an MRI tomorrow; looks like I’ve got a torn meniscus. It’s gotten worse, sadly, and just walking around the house is starting to give me fits. I don’t know when it’s going to give out. I wasn’t working out now unless there was someone with me, and now they are all telling me I need to lay off.

But I figured out what the question was for me: Did I want to keep hoping it would work itself out or grit my teeth and go to the orthopedic surgeon? And when I asked that question, my husband had an answer. He had me talk to his friend who’d had both ACLs reconstructed and a meniscus tear repaired.  He said the ACL hurt like hell, but that it was pretty easy to recover from the meniscus surgery. Now, this guy is a lot tougher than I am, so I doubt I’ll bounce back quite so fast, but I had the answer. I just had to figure out what the question was.

If I have a tear, I’m ready to get in the chair/gurney/whatever the heck they want to prop me on to do the arthroscopy. Just give me drugs and let’s get this over with so I can get back to regular workouts.

And, if I don’t have the tear, I’ll have my next question: How do I get the damn thing stable enough to start exercising again (the orthopedic guy told me to stay off it for now)?

The question has to be asked, again and again, because you’ll be at a different place each time you ask yourself the question. Right now I’m injured. I started eating badly for a while, reflexively feeling sorry for myself, but I’m pretty much over that. How was eating badly going to help me, past a fleeting pleasure of the taste? I was enjoying feeling more healthy. I want to go to there. [nods to Tina Fey]

I’ve made my decision at some point during all my angsting and whining on this blog. I’m not giving up. I’m not giving in. I’m here until the journey ends. And even if I can’t get to where I would have been had I started down this path when I was young and trim, I can still get down the path some. Farther than if I’d never decided to take it.

It may sound trite, but it’s about the process, the journey, whatever cliched version you want.  It’s about asking yourself the hard questions. It’s trite and cliched for a reason: It is the truth.

The crying game

Posted: September 10, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Weight Loss
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Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) wielding a Wei...

Paul Atreides (Kyle MacLachlan) wielding a Weirding Module in David Lynch’s Dune (1984) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

In the classic sci-fi “Dune,” the protagonist, Paul Atreides, brings the desert-dwelling, still-suit wearing, water-conservationist inhabitants, the Fremen, of Arrakis to a standstill by shedding tears. It’s rare for them, and they all look at him differently after he’s cried, but not with disdain. Quite the opposite.

The scene came to mind after I had a crying spell during the time I’ve been offline. Not weeping, which was really all Paul was doing; you know, stoically grim-faced with the single tear running down your face. Nope, I was in full-blown sobbing like a bellow. The kind where the only thing that stops it (or at least forces you to take a break) is that you can’t breathe any longer because you’ve produced more mucus than a kindergarten class during cold season.

But, Fremen, it’s more than a waste of water. It actually alleviates the built-up tension. And, you may ask, what did I have to be so blasted tense about?

Failure.

Isn’t that what haunts us whenever we set ourselves high goals?  The fear that we will fail. And I felt myself falling down the hill I’d been climbing. (Or maybe skiing down it on my face, which is how I recall my decades-old experience on the slopes.)

At first, I kept thinking it would get better in a day or so. Then we went to the doctor, and she said “No exercise for at least a week.” Gary then asked about upper body exercise, and she said that would be okay, but if it wasn’t better after a week or so, then call her to schedule an MRI.

Other than that, it was ice and Naproxen. And I’d ice the hell out of that puppy. Used to be you couldn’t make me ice any injury because I thought the ice was worse than the pain, but we’ve got these ACE bandage wraps for the ice gel now, so it’s not a choice between frostbite or so much insulation that you might as well not bother.

The Naproxen, though, messed me up. I believe I’ve mentioned before that the drugs I take to avoid migraines could probably make a hippo high. (Hippo: Wow, man, look, my sweat is red/Hippo’s friend: Dude, chill. It’s always red.) I went through months of slowly inching it up and figuring out the timing so I don’t faceplant at awkward times. But the Naproxen was enough, shockingly, to make me all kinds of a drooling zombie. It took a couple of weeks to figure out how to get that timed so that I wasn’t getting pie-eyed at awkward times.

But we kept trying to get in the upper body workouts when the  knee calmed down. And each time, the damn knee would get worse after. So I began, in Gary’s words, to “eat for entertainment,” a very bad habit, particularly when I wanted carbs to dance for me. As far as I’m concerned, a pole dance is not enticing, but give me a bagel with just a small cover of Philly, and I’m putty.

But it felt like a thousand failures rolling up on me. The same thing I’ve felt every time I quit something (diets in particular, but not just them) because some force majeure popped up to say “boo!” Yes, injuries and illnesses put you back.

Which brings us to the point when I cried myself blotchy and snotty. Luckily Gary was home, and he’s a wise enough man to let me cry rather than to try to get me to stop. He just provides shoulder and kleenexes until I’ve gotten the emotional balance back that comes after the storm passes.

I realize now that it was that point that the decision was made. We talked about how I was feeling, how pissed off I was that my clothes were feeling a little tighter (hence no EOM weigh-in and measurement; I didn’t want to check my stats because I was afraid that would be the death blow), how I’d started avoiding doing the things that were helping me stay on track (including this blog) and why I was now doomed to fail.

And, somehow, during that discussion, I decided I wasn’t going to fail. I started getting my eating back under control, but I took the longest break from working out I’ve had since I started.  Last night, just before I started writing this post, I did an all upper body workout. I’ve been symptom free for four days now.

The workout was a bitch. And so was I, mostly because I was frustrated that I wasn’t able to do things as well as I had before I took the break. No, not all the way down to where I was when I started, but definitely lower capacity. I was frustrated, but not particularly surprised, because in the back of my head I kept wondering how long before I started actually losing the muscle I’d built.

Sure, I’ve now got a setback, but I felt the best about myself and the odds of getting fit than I have since somewhere around the beginning of July. Then, sitting down to the ‘puter,  I read a post by Adam Bornstein, the link to which had been sitting in my inbox for almost two weeks, which was entitled “Is this your health downfall?”  I wished I’d read it sooner when I realized that here this guy, much younger and healthier than I (or at least I’m convinced that’s the case), was going through the same thing I was:

During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been faced with a constant reminder of my own limitations. A recent back injury slowed my normally active lifestyle to a halt. Among the biggest frustrations: My inability to exercise left me with no way to counterbalance the frustrations of long work days, the stress of wedding planning, and my insatiable love of almond butter.

As I struggled with the incapacitating pain of my injury, I found that my physical abilities weren’t all that was affected. I lost my patience faster, became frustrated easier, and generally morphed into something that wasn’t representative of who I wanted to be. I was left with a simple question: When you can’t do what you want, must everything else also suffer?

We live in a world where excuses are prominent and real. But if you’re not careful, temporary excuses can become a permanent way of life. I’ve experienced it myself. I was once an overweight kid and rationalized that I had bad genes and could never be fit. Clearly, my self-perception became the world I created for myself, rather than the far-reaching potential that lives within us all.

Adam clearly learned the lesson much earlier than I did: that you can’t give up on yourself completely because of a valid reason to partially back off. I am still working into the mindset, being an old dog learning a new trick, that the choice isn’t either I’m the paragon of weight loss and fitness pursuit or I’m doomed to be the deconditioned lump of a person I’ve been.

And both my husband and my daughter have taken great pains to remind me of the mental journey I’ve taken: It’s rather astonishing that I, the lifetime hater when it came to working out, am agonizing over the fact that I can’t workout at the level I want to, rather than being secretly relieved I have a legit excuse to quit.

So I finish this post in the wee hours of the night, having awakened with  the same damn knee hot and hurting. I’m going to get the ice pack. I may have to miss some more workouts. Hell, I may have to get surgery for a torn meniscus if  the damn thing doesn’t finally go away. I have injured myself.

But I know, remembering that crying session, that I’ve already made my decision. I’m not giving up. I’m not going to go back to the way I was.

My husband, once again, is a role model for me. He injured his right shoulder and went through what I’ve been doing: It would get better, then he’d reinjure it, and it kept spiraling down. Finally he went to the doctor and get the MRI, and the orthopedic surgeon told him, yes, it could eventually get better, but there was as good a chance that it would not. Gary waited far longer than he should have to get the surgery (many of the reasons for that were valid), but he didn’t stop working out during the period he was waiting to get the shoulder fixed. He stuck it out, modifying his workouts to things he could do, and treating the shoulder like I am now: ice and Naproxen.

He did get the surgery, and the tear was worse than it appeared in the MRI. And now he’s worked his way back up to the point that no one who wasn’t there would realize he’d ever had shoulder surgery. And, as he  pointed out, DeJuan Blair goes out and kicks ass on the basketball court, and the reason we (meaning the San Antonio Spurs) got him is that the teams with higher draft picks thought the man’s lack of ACLs would be a problem. Doesn’t seem that way to me (despite the embarrassing end-of-season Spurs faceplant).

So the injury, even if it’s the worst case scenario, doesn’t mean I’m done. Yeah, I’m not in as good a shape as my husband (and clearly nowhere near as in shape as a young professional basketball player), but the principle is the same. Just on a different scale. And I don’t have to give up all the things I’ve been doing to stay in the right frame of  mind and to be healthy just because I can’t do a squat right now.

Scaling. That’s what I said to begin with and I’m bloody well going to do it now. I’ve shaken my head at people being foolish enough not to scale down when needed, and now it seems I’ve been playing the fool.

So my crying game will have a happy ending, damn it. Even if I am going back to bed with an ice pack on my knee, oh, Susannah. But don’t you cry for me.

P.S. [Possible spoiler alert] No, I’m not a tranny. I just like stealing titles from more gifted writers than myself.

Attitude adjustment

Posted: August 8, 2011 in CrossFit, Exercise, Fitness, Health, Weight Loss
Tags: , , , ,
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I write about change and motivation a lot because I know I need to change my attitudes as much as I do my actions, as all actions originate in thought.

So I thought I’d talk about the progress I’ve made, since today I realized I’d made some in the upstairs department.

As you may know, the past month has been a struggle. I’ve had setbacks because of health issues: injuries, illness and minor surgery. I’ve felt my time has been more limited due to some additional responsibilities, and was discouraged that my record-keeping and blogging had suffered as a result.

I had a two-day migraine for my weekend activity, but today I finally felt better. And I realized that, although I was not happy I hadn’t been able to work out the past two days, I hadn’t doubted (for a change) that I would start back as soon as I could. And today, when I woke up enough to realize I really did feel better, I was not just ready to exercise, but juiced about it. My husband had to dial me back a notch.

I set up the items I needed in the garage and went back in to do my treadmill warm-up. Put on Pandora and got two songs I liked and can add to the repertoire (The Clash, “Should I Stay or Should I Go?” and Duran Duran “Hungry Like the Wolf).

It’s amazing how fast the garage can heat up in less than 20 minutes during August. Oy. Note to self (and anyone else with GERD): When working out in the heat, make sure you’ve taken your Nexium enough ahead of a workout or you’re gonna get reflux.  And start hydrating sooner.

And yet I was still pumped to work out. I think perhaps that it’s because, although I generally am in denial about it, I have a competitive streak, and even more to my chagrin, I only like to compete when I think I’ve got a chance of making some sort of showing. The fact that I’m only competing against myself makes it easier to win, at least as long as I stick with it.

I’m sure there will still be days when I’m dragging myself by the hair to go work out, but it’s rather a shock to me, who abhorred the thought of exercise, that I can, on occasion, actually work out with pleasure.

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