RESULTS SHOW II

OK, I'm tight on time at the moment but I'm again without internet access at home this weekend so I wanted to at least give a quick post to commemorate completing my second bootcamp!

I ran my little heart out this morning and handily beat my goal of a 9 minute mile by 29 whole seconds! Yep, my fastest mile time is now 8:31, which was a 1:12 improvement over October 22. I was actually suprised to see such a big drop, now I'm determined to get under 8 minutes!

Didn't see such huge improvements in the other tests. My second best improvement was in push ups and I did the exact same number of sit ups. I really crank them out and I think I'm almost maxed on the physical number of times my body can make that motion in a minute at 39. Although one of my instructors says he maxes out at 45 so I'd like to at least squeeze 6 more in there!

My husband is in Tuscany for work and keeps complaining about all the hours the clients are making him sit down and eat 6 course meals. I'm SO excited about him gaining weight. I'm evil. But seriously, all he has to do to drop 10lbs is think about it hard so don't feel too sorry for him!

BIG THANKS to my friend Shane and my Dad who slept over at my house this week so that I could make boot camp in the mornings. It is CONCRETE support like that which makes ALL the difference. I'm really blessed to have it from so many quarters.

I'll find some way to check back in tomorrow after the Paideia 5K and I promise to post a picture of me with my trophy once my husband gets back with the laptop!

I've removed the "Goal Weight" from my sidebar. The more I thought about it the more I realized that I wasn't really focused on that at all. My goal was an arbitrary number that I vaguely remember weighing almost a decade ago. I may add a "goal inches" category but I was too lazy to measure myself at the start of bootcamp so I'll have to call Jenny Craig and get the measurements they took of me back in May and compare them to now. And then I'll have to resist the lure of Jenny Craig. I really do love their food. It's hard to resist the convenience but I know that I want to eat fresher more REAL foods from here on out.

One final note: my underwear is too big. Luckily its too cold to be wearing skirts without pantyhose or I'd be risking an unfortunate incident. Maybe that's what happened to Brittany? Maybe she inadvertently danced her panties right off! I've got some Victoria's Secret coupons but I'm a little nervous about using them . . . on the one hand, I might love how I look in everything and I'll buy half the store. On the other hand, I might still get over critical and devolve into a ball of self-loathing in the dressing room. I THINK I've developed some resistance to the second scenario but just not sure yet.

Splintastic dawn rising . . .

Some random thoughts:
1. Now that the annual fall time change has occurred the sun rises about halfway through bootcamp every morning. Sure, it’s pretty and all that but it makes me feel like I’m running late every day. And I always get that uncomfortable feeling that I’ve stayed on the dance floor too long and my makeup is all sweated off and that sexy gyration I was just doing has suddenly become kind of scary when they unkindly turn on all the fluourescents and tell us its time to LEAVE.
2. My shins don’t mind jogging but they’re not a big fan of sprinting. I had almost no problem with them in the 5K but they consistently hurt during bootcamp. Yesterday we did sprinting and I’ve been hobbling around with sore shins and one aching hamstring ever since. This morning we did Altitude Adjustment and tackled hills all morning. My legs are uber annoyed with me right now. But that’s ok. I have a 6 year old. I am impervious to whining.
3. My abs continue to amaze me. Situps are the easiest exercise we do, I look forward to them as a break from everything else. I’m wondering if they were already in better shape than I gave them credit for due to compensating for my weak back for all those years.
4. My back feels good, I still am careful about the way I move it sometimes but so far it has taken everything I’ve dished out.
5. I’ve mapped out five races I want to run over the next 2 months, including the Paideia one this weekend. Three are in consecutive weekends in December, all are 5K. I’m also eyeing the St. Pete Beach Classic on January 19. That’s MLK weekend and my vacation will have rolled over so we could visit family, hit the beach and I could run a really cool race. There is both a 5K and an 8K option. Doing the 8K would rock, then I could shoot for a 10K sometime in the Spring.
6. One of the major stressors in my marriage over time has been my lack of health and fitness and my husband’s concern about same. Given my current attitude I can’t really explain why I resisted exercising for so long. I remember major fights about his expectations that I could do things like “run”. I used to tell him that demanding something like that was totally unreasonable, that I could NEVER be a “runner”. If bootcamp had been advertised as a runner’s camp I’d never have signed up. I would do things like walking, and not particularly quickly. I was all about the “low impact” options. I believe that having low impact options is important, and done properly they are valid cardio workouts. But I abused the “low impact” terminology and translated it into minimal effort. I put great faith into this “8 Minutes in the Morning” workout that was on all the talk shows a few years ago, completely ignoring that the author of that program said you ALSO had to do cardio three times a week in addition to the 8 minutes of sitting in a chair lifting 3 lb weights. So when my back would go out, or when I couldn’t manage something physical, he would get frustrated because he felt like I had put myself in that position needlessly. And he was right to be frustrated. So last week when he was feeling badly due to some health issues going on with him I got really frustrated with him because I felt he hadn’t been taking care of himself and I snapped at him, “I’ve got limited sympathy because your pain is due to the fact that you’re not taking care of yourself!” Even before the sentence was completely out of my mouth I realized how ridiculous I sounded. I turned to him with a stunned expression (and he was understandably looking pretty annoyed). “Can you believe I just said that to you???” I asked. He softened and chuckled, and I started laughing. I couldn’t believe how ridiculous it was that I was at last in a position where I could even begin to say that without being a total hypocrite. As the evening wore on the deliciousness of that exchange just kept cracking me up. I was totally tickled with myself.
7. “Delicious” is one of my favorite words. As evident above, I believe it should be applied in many situations that have nothing to do with food. Although the results can be a little disturbing as when Anne Geddes was quoted as saying that she thought newborns looked “delicious”.
8. We’re hosting Thanksgiving at our house for the first time EVER this year. It will be small (thankfully) but is sure to still be amusing. I’m tempted to purchase everything already cooked but we do have a beautiful kitchen now with acres of countertop on which to screw up. Hey, I can run over 3 miles. Perhaps cooking something that doesn’t come out of a box (“all ingredients included!!!!”) isn’t such an impossible feat either.
9. Pumpkin pies are like Pringles, can’t have just one!
10. Sugar Free Red Bull probably isn’t really “good” for me.

Mile Markers

Remember how much I hated the mile markers on my first 5K? This time around I enjoyed them. It was nice to have time keepers there and they also reaffirmed my own growing sense of distances. I was pretty accurate in predicting when I should start looking for them and that made me feel competent. I think I’m a competent runner. Seeing those words on the screen as I type them is still so surreal. I found my stride pretty easily on this run. I found the sound of my breathing to be relaxing and almost hypnotic. I actively appreciated my surroundings and wondered at how much more manicured the park is now than it was 15+ years ago. I could picture my teenage self hanging out on the path and I could see myself through her eyes and I was impressed. I kept pace with more people than I thought I could. I passed some folks. There was a first year male associate from my firm who recently completed a bootcamp in Piedmont park running. He started off fast, but then he had stopped to take a break at the top of a hill after the first mile and I cruised past him, then he passed me, then he stopped again and walked, and I passed him and so we went back and forth. Except he started passing me less often. I even hazarded the thought that I would actually beat this much younger, taller guy but he rallied on the final downhill and passed me, beating me by mere seconds at the finish line. I felt the urge to quip at him that “slow and steady wins the race” but I think I wisely kept my mouth shut, especially considering he did take me right at the finish. As we approached the finish I initially focused on trying to sprint past him but when I noticed the clock was at 36:04 I realized that I still had a chance to make a full 4 minute improvement over Candler Park so my focus shifted to besting myself instead of him. Those final 5 seconds were so in slow motion but I felt so strong lengthening my stride to beat the clock and when my friend Shane and my son said I looked fast coming through the finish chute I couldn’t disagree with them.

High on my success, I’m actually thinking of tackling another 5K this Saturday (based in no small part on the constant encouragement of my bootcamp instructor Jojo). I had to miss bootcamp this morning because I didn’t have anyone to hang with my son so doing something active on Saturday will help me feel like it was a complete week. And this 5K is being organized by Paideia, a private school which I actually attended from 3rd – 5th grade. It will begin and end on that campus (which admittedly has grown a LOT since the early 1980’s) so it will be another opportunity to connect with my central self from long ago. I have many good memories of my time there. Although I hated PE there as much as I hated it at any school I remember it being less oppressive, less terrorizing than PE in the public schools I attended the rest of the time. I gained some competence at foursquare there, and I learned to hang upside down by my knees on a bar and flip over to the ground, something I used to do over and over because it felt cool and I was so amazed I could do it. We also went an annual overnight camping trips with our class and I remember completing a 6 mile hike on our third grade trip that made me as proud as if I had scaled Everest. So it feels like it would be the right thing to do to participate and help them raise money for their financial aid program.

I’ve started my own mile marker program at home. We have a large walk in / dressing closet where we keep all of our clothes along with a full length mirror. I’ve spent a lot of time criticizing myself in that mirror. When I got home Saturday I took the number from the Candler Park race and noted the distance, date, and my time on it with a sharpie. I did the same thing with my number from Kids Chance. I then put them on the wall above the mirror. The mirror is not on a huge wall, but it will take a while to cover it with numbers. Anytime I’m standing there feeling critical, that wall of numbers will stand there demanding that I acknowledge them . . . and acknowledge myself. I am more than a dress form. I am more than my weight. I am a runner. I am a bootcamp vet. The feelings that accompany those acts of fitness are not measurable on any scale. The spirit is weightless when it soars.

Trophys rock!

I think they are vastly underutilized in my life! Just a quick post from my friend's computer since our laptop is in Italy with my husband. I ran the Kids Chance 5K this morning. I'll write more detail later (and add a picture) but I just wanted to get this posted.

It was a great race, much kinder course than Candler Park was. And I was much more confident (which was wierd given my state of mind the past week).

1 mile marker I was at 10:46
2 mile marker I was at 22:10
I finished at 36:09!!!! Exactly 4 minutes faster than Candler Park! And you won't believe it but I got a TROPHY! I came in 3rd in the 27-35 year old female group! Ok, clearly there were not many of us in that category but it still felt AWESOME! I got my picture taken by the official photographer and everything!

CRAZY!

Can't wait to post a picture of me and my trophy, not sure when I'll be able too.

Enjoy the gorgeous weather if you're in Atlanta!

Lullwater

This is where I’ll be running the Kids Chance 5K tomorrow morning, God willing. And I think I’m going to need God on this one. My heart is faltering a bit more than I’d like. Despite the new shoes my shins were really hurting after Thursday’s workout which was a pretty simple circuit routine since it was Bring a Friend Day so hardly any pavement running at all. And emotionally my heart feels very defeated. Hardly an ideal frame of mind. But when I searched for images of the park and saw this one I felt somewhat reassured. Perhaps I’ll be able to let go of some of the angst that has been gripping so tight when I’m steeped in a place of such beauty. And history. This park is right behind my old high school. And behind the VA Hospital where I volunteered as a teenager. And behind, on the other side, the primate research facility where I worked one summer in college. I have spent a lot of time in that park. Skipping school and crossing the railroad tracks to burst into the freedom of the sheltering forest. Shyly walking hand in hand with boys I liked, or simply coveting their attention amongst a larger group. Striding with defiance, alone, rejecting the “establishment” of my family and my school for the wild ache of adolescence. Ambling in quiet, yet strident contemplation of my place in the world during that summer of college, feeling like surely no one before me had ever felt things as deeply as I did.

It has been at least 15 years since I have set foot in that park. My connections with those earlier iterations of me are becoming more tenuous. But they are still there. And I can say with some confidence that I don’t ever think I could have imagined myself running a race in those woods at the ancient age of 35. I’m certain I didn’t anticipate that at such a thoroughly adult age I would still feel lost so much of the time.

In retrospect, I hope I do connect with that still malleable younger me. She had a lot of things right in terms of priorities. Things which have gotten muddled in the years of racing to meet goals and responsibilities since. If I find her, if she travels with me for a spell on this race, I think I’ll do ok.

Passing through Between

I missed bootcamp again yesterday morning. I initially went to sleep Monday night but something woke me after only an hour and I began to mentally and emotionally freak out over various issues in my life. I was borderline panic attack for half the night. I kept counseling myself to breathe and to focus on what IS good in my life but it was a very long and challenging night. I finally dropped off just a bit before my bootcamp alarm clock went off. I was scheduled to spend the day assisting my boss and it would have been very very bad for me to have dozed off during all the sitting and listening that my day would involve. So I opted to get the extra two hours of sleep. I don’t think that was the wrong decision but I kept having this nagging feeling that I had forgotten something all day. And I hated feeling so subject to the whims of my night terrors, irrational or rational.

My day involved a trip to Monroe, GA. To get to Monroe, I had to drive through a town called Between. I passed the Between Grocery. The Between Baptist Church. Ho Hum Hollow Rd. I wondered what it was like to live in Between. Do people actually settle in Between? How do they cope with living in Between? Don’t they worry that they should be further up the road . . . or further back down the other way? Are they trying to avoid rocks and other assorted hard places?

Perhaps I should move there. I live in a constant state of Between. Between things I’m fleeing and things I’m running toward. Will I ever get THERE, wherever THERE is? Even if I do, I suspect I’ll still feel in Between, because there is always something further away that I want. Am I simply a wanderer, in a good way, who thrives on the next personal project, the next goal? Or am I actually lost in a place called Between? Incapable of finding fulfillment where I am? Perhaps there’s more to appreciate on Ho Hum Hollow Rd. in Between than I realized.

Last night I slept like the dead. And was wide awake by 5:05 am and on my way. Part of me secretly still expects me to give up on this particular journey. Its always a relief, and a bit of a surprise, especially after a stumble or a step back, to thwart that expectation.

And now for some shoes

Here are my "old" (purchased September 9, the afternoon before Bootcamp started at a big box sporting goods store) shoes.

And here is one of my new shoes (which I was too lazy to actually remove from my foot).




The other thing my Dr. said I must do for my shins was get new shoes. So I have a new pair of Asics Gel 1120s to correct my overpronation and provide me with lots of cushioning. I wore them all weekend and ran in them for the first time this morning and I give them a big thumbs up. I had virtually no pain while running although my shins were sore again after I cooled down. Clint doesn't think they are as cute as my "old" shoes but they FEEL extra cute so I'm cool with that!