Tag Archives: Fitness

Walking and Running

Posted by dkrashb on

I am working out with a trainer at a gym that seems to largely cater to younger people (younger than me, that is).  When I first signed up for training, the trainer asked me if I had an event I was getting ready for like vacation or a wedding.  Apparently I am unusual in that I don’t get motivated to workout by major events in my life.  I just want to be able to do fun things that require moderate fitness and I have a hard time getting to the gym if I don’t have an appointment.  I’m OK with only going to the gym 2x a week.  I’d rather get exercise outside or in yoga class (which I have yet to go to since moving to Chattanooga).  My trainer sent me “homework” that suggests what I should be doing on the days I’m not working out with him.  He congratulated me for deciding to make a “change.”  I’m not sure if he really gets the notion of just maintaining.

That said, today I am going to the gym at 5:30AM.  This is because it’s hard to get convenient times in the morning before work and, by joining up with another woman, we will work out for an hour instead of a half hour.  I’m not quite clear on why I can’t just go at 6:00Am for a half hour, but apparently this woman likes to train for an hour.  In any case, the alarm goes off at 4:45Am and it’s the first time my alarm has gone off before I was awake in about 2 months.  I’m a little annoyed that I booked an appointment at 5:30AM at a time when I couldn’t sleep past 4:00AM, but I’ve now slept until 6:00AM several days in a row and, of course, I have to get up at 4:45AM.  But, I steel myself and get out of bed, trying to remind myself how good I feel after I work out.

After having some coffee and doing some basic grooming (like brushing my teeth and running my wet hands through my crazy hair to try to calm it down), I pull on workout clothes and fix myself a bottle of water.  I walk next door and stow my jacket in the locker room.  I have 10 minutes, so I get on a treadmill.  Today, it’s clean–possibly an advantage of coming in at 5:30?

I walk for a while and then realize that it’s after 5:30AM and there is no sign of my trainer.  He had mentioned that the woman I was supposed to work out with hadn’t signed up yet two days ago, so I find myself wondering if I’m working out with him at 6:00AM instead.  Since he’s a punctual guy, I decide I might as well get some cardio and step up my treadmill pace.  I alternate 1 minute intervals of walking and running.  I really hate to run.  I don’t know why.  I have vague memories from childhood of spending most of my time running around outside chasing things like run away balls and, later, boys.  I remember racing across the field outside my elementary school and trying to outrun the wind.  I’m not sure how one knows when one is outrunning the wind, but it seemed like a fun game at the time.  Yet, by the time I was 15 and thought seriously about trying out for track for all of 24 hours, going out for a morning run felt like torture.  And that is how I have continued to feel about running ever since.

Unfortunately for me, walking on a treadmill is about as interesting as watching concrete harden.  I have to do something to break up the time.  So, I run one minute at a time.  Each run interval, I go a little faster until I get to an 8 MPH pace.  For those who prefer not to do math, that is 7.5 minutes per mile, more than 1 1/2 times the average pace of Mutai over 26.2 miles at the Boston Marathon.  Did I mention that I feel like I’m sprinting at a 7.5 minute/mile pace?  I might be able to run faster, but I have too many visions of shooting off the back of the treadmill and crashing through the window behind me to try.  So far, I’ve only come off a treadmill once, and it was worth it to see the look on my trainer’s face that day since I sustained only a minor bruise.  But, there’s no one around to catch me today, so I’m good with maxing out at this pace.

After spending 20 minutes alternating running and walking, I decide I should start slowing down.  I figure my trainer will arrive at 6AM and I don’t want to be too out of breath to start lifting.  I slow the pace to a 4.0 MPH walk and decrease the incline to slow my heart.  After a few minutes, I slow down some more and keep slowing down the pace every 30 seconds until I’m crawling along at 3.0 MPH.  My trainer arrives and walks by to let me know he’s there.

When I join him, he’s headed to the Smith press so I can do squats.  I tell him I just did running intervals on an incline as I mop my face with my shirt (I keep forgetting they don’t provide towels).  He asks me if I usually do cardio before lifting.  I laugh and explain that I thought we were starting at 5:30 and thought I’d do cardio since I was there.  As it turns out, he had texted me last night to tell me we would go at 6:00AM instead, but I didn’t get his text before turning off my phone for the night.  For a moment, I am nostalgic about the days when we had landline telephones in our homes and people actually called us on them when they wanted to tell us something.  But, times have changed and now technology makes our lives both easier and, sometimes, more annoying.

I do the squats on my tired legs and complete a tough 30 minute leg workout.  Doing legs always makes me dizzy.  The up and down of squatting makes me light headed after a while.  I’ve been told this is because I have low blood pressure.  Whatever the reason, I think it’s a good excuse for the fact that I accidentally (I swear!) walked into the men’s locker room after my workout.  Truthfully, I didn’t make it around the corner to actually see anything, realizing that the entry looked unfamiliar, but I sure scooted out of there quickly when I realized my mistake!  There are surveillance cameras all over the gym–I bet I made someone smile at least.

When I make it into the correct locker room, I take some time to really stretch.  There is space in the women’s locker room with an exercise ball and two matts on the floor.  I’m not sure what you’re supposed to do there, but stretching seemed like a good use of the space.  I went through several yoga poses, practicing yogic breathing.  As I relax into pigeon pose, I realize I haven’t stretched for weeks.  I really need to get yoga back into my schedule when we get back from our upcoming trip–every muscle feels like wood.  After spending 20 minutes trying to regain some flexibility, I’m pretty sure it’s time for a nap.  But, I head home knowing that there will be no nap today.

On Visiting

Posted by dkrashb on

After arriving in Columbus, I quickly realize several things about coming for a visit:

  1. Friends are more important than errands–scheduling tasks from getting my iPad fixed to getting my hair done leaves little time to see friends in the few waking hours left after work.
  2. Co-workers are more important than errands–missing happy hour with colleagues in favor of appointments wastes a rare opportunity to socialize with people I enjoy.
  3. Making a list of everyone I want to see and scheduling time with them before I leave and before I schedule any kind of mundane task should help make time to see everyone next trip.
  4. Spending time with people I care about is important because I don’t know how long it will be before I get to see them again, even if I just saw them 2 weeks ago.
  5. Having a mobile broadband connection that works makes like easier.
  6. When I pack, I need to count carefully and not get distracted in the middle of packing.

These lessons were, of course, learned the hard way.  Thinking I could take care of tasks in Columbus more easily than in Chattanooga because I knew where to go caused me to pack my schedule with stuff I really would have preferred not to do.  I missed out on the opportunity to spend time with people.  We ended up with only 3 evenings that we could schedule anything and one of them was shared with a 2-hour hair appointment, making for a late evening on a work night.  I mentally go through a list of the people we didn’t get to see and groan inwardly.

On the plus side, staying with friends worked out well–at least for us.  Sharing a cup of coffee in the wee hours of the morning with my fellow insomniac made a great way to start the day (although I suppose we both would have liked an extra hour or two of sleep).  And our schedules were offset just enough that we got to spend some quality time together without getting in each other’s way (I hope).

Driving was interesting.  I didn’t think about having only one car to share with Pat while in Columbus.  As it turned out, he did all the driving until we were on our way home again, so I went almost 3 weeks before I got behind the wheel again.  Not having a car also made it difficult to arrange time with friends at lunch.  I managed to have lunch with work friends, but missed the chance to get together with a friend who I could have seen if I’d had a car to meet her for lunch.

We left for Columbus on a Sunday with Pat doing the driving so I could get caught up on some work.  Unfortunately, my work laptop refused to play nicely with our USB broadband device and we found ourselves wardriving for a WiFi network so I could get a document emailed that needed to be in Hong Kong in time for the start of their Monday morning.  Worried that I would forget to send it when we got to Columbus, I wanted to make sure it went out while I was thinking about it.  Fortunately, McDonald’s now offers free WiFi, accessible from their parking lot.  But driving around looking for internet access does not make for an efficient car trip.

As for getting distracted while packing, once we are in Columbus, I discovered why my suitcase looked so empty.  I’d stopped packing before I’d finished gathering together everything I needed for working out (especially my workout bag) and I’d mis-counted the number of days I needed work clothes.  With no workout bag, I ended up packing my change of work clothes for after my workout into my laptop bag, which caused me to forget my lovely heels.  I ended up having to wear my fivefingers shoes all day the first day I went to the gym.  If you’ve never seen fivefingers shoes, check them out.  While they are the best shoes I’ve ever worked out in, they aren’t exactly complementary to work attire.  I comforted myself that not that many people would see me in my silly shoes, but, of course, we have a firedrill at the office that day and I ended up in the parking lot along with the entire population of our building.  As I walk across the parking lot, I count the number of times I hear, “Nice shoes!”  Oh well.

Do Nomads Need Personal Trainers?

Posted by dkrashb on

 

The Hill

I imagine trying to explain the concept of a personal trainer to a nomad. Where would I start? How would I explain that if I don’t make time for exercise, I don’t get any to someone who spends most of their day on their feet?  Then, how would I convince them that it makes perfect sense to pay someone to appoint a time and place for us to meet so s/he can tell me what to do? How crazy would it seem that I am so far removed from the physical activity of my ancestors that I have to learn how to stay fit? As crazy as it may seem to our ancestors, the reality of mainstream life is that many of us spend most of our waking hours sitting at a computer.  For me, while I manage to work walking, biking, and yoga into my routine, I have a harder time with strength training. So, I embrace my mainstream-self and sign up for a three month personal training package.

It’s a funny thing about working out. When I first worked out with a trainer, it was all about the weights. Then, circa 2002, more holistic body movements came into fashion, returning us to childhood gym classes with medicine balls, balancing balls, pulleys, and a wide assortment of other torture devices. Today, trainers seem to have shifted even more towards using your own body weight and have added bursts of cardio into each workout.

Here in Chattanooga, the trainer took me out to do hill runs between strength exercises. I’ve never actually done hill runs. Maybe because I grew up in Columbus, OH? Thankfully, it was a short hill. He prodded me to “sprint” up the hill. I was breathing too hard to explain that I was sprinting; I flashed back to playing co-rec softball and running for first base with my teammates yelling encouragements like, “Drop the piano!” And that was on a flat surface. I can run fast, actually. Even very fast for short distances. What I can’t do is accelerate from a stop. I’m a slow accelerator. This is a mystery to me. It’s like my legs are too long and my brain loses track of where they went. If I get into a rhythm for a while, something in my brain clicks and it knows where my feet are again and knows how to tell them to move faster. Of course, getting into a rhythm and running are not two things that occur in the same sentence for me very often–I would far rather get my cardio with a set of wheels taking all the abuse.

But, today, I run. The heat and gravity push against me like a wall. I keep pushing back, knowing the hill will end soon. My breath accelerates faster than my legs. I reach the top before I give out. I take a moment to breathe deeply, trying to restore my heart rate to something that simulates normal. I look at my trainer who laughs at me. I ponder briefly why I am spending money to have someone make me do things I don’t want to do. Then, I bounce awkwardly back down the hill backwards (another twist of modern training), giggling to myself as I experience a flash of the childhood silliness that goes with skipping backwards down a hill. I realize this is fun. Then I do push ups at the bottom and feel pride that I am strong enough to do them well.

Fitness is a funny thing. I’ve learned over many years of vacillating between couch-potatoeness and obsessive (if clumsy) althetic-ness that black-and-white thinking does not allow me to sustain fitness. Killing myself in the gym leads to pain and exhaustion, which leads to sitting on the couch for stretches that can reach months. Working exercise into my life sustainably has now given me a lot of years of moderate fitness. Realizing that I will never be a good athlete was a break-through moment for me. Accepting my limitations (which I am grateful are just a lack of coordination and desire) and allowing just a little regular exercise to be enough maintains my health. Ultimately, health is my goal–I accept that I will never again look like I did when I was 25 or 28 or 32 . . .

In moments (of which there were recently many) when I can do things like lift a heavy box and carry it confidently, I congratulate myself for finding this balance. There is something empowering about knowing I can do something. It opens doors to taking on tasks that would otherwise seem daunting. It allows for possibilities like hang gliding, bike tours, backpacking, and even just taking the stairs. This precarious balance between stressing myself and reducing stress creates a daily experience of can-do versus wish-I-could-do. I run that hill not because I want to but because I want to know that possibility is open to me, too.