this blog is moving!

A couple of weeks ago I mentioned my desire to move the blog onto my own domain, and I have finally done that. You'll find it at www.braveathena.com

The old entries (everything but this one) are already there. Please come visit, update your links, resubscribe to the new address—and I'll try to make it worth your while!

back at work

So, I'm back at work. My symptoms are not bad at all, except for the inability to do anything physical without wearing myself out. So no planned exercise today.

As if to remind me of my pathetic state, I ran into one of the M-W-F gym regulars on my way into work. We both just smiled and nodded, and I thought, dammit, he just came from the gym. I was jealous! Soon, I'll get back to this stuff. Soon.

home sick

Well, I'm sick again. This is terribly disappointing. Yesterday I started with the hot and cold, constant sneezing, constant nose running, and exhaustion with simple activities. Sigh. So I'm home so I don't share it with others.

The worst of it is that I am sick. Simple activities, like bringing my coffee cup to the kitchen, winds me, and bringing clothing upstairs covers me in a head-to-toe sweat, drenching the waistband of my pajama bottoms.

Saturday morning, a few of us PFitters met at one of the running stores. They had a fashion show, and then offered us 20% off. They had some really cute things. And of course, they had nothing in my size in women's clothing. I was surprised to find out that they didn't have anything that fit my best pal J, who is much smaller, really, an average-sized American woman. "You know," she says, "I bet they'd sell a lot of clothes if they had a broader range of sizes". Well, duh. But who is making them?

One of my goals with losing a little weight this winter is not just gaining speed, but also being able to buy cute women's workout wear. I want to be able to buy clothes, not mail-order, but in a store—and not socks! I am so far away from that. I am trying to get there, but I am so far away.

I looked at exercise equipment afterwards. Treadmills, ellipticals, stationary bikes. Fun. Love working out on the machines in a store. I don't know that I'm getting any closer to buying. I keep thinking, I could get up at 4:30, and I could drive to the gym and workout a couple hours and drive the car back home (or somewhere—I can't afford to park downtown), and then I think—how realistic is that, really?

bicycling

I biked into work this morning. I felt a bit creaky—no doubt from yesterday's walk, Monday's bruises, and not having ridden in a couple weeks—but it also felt pretty good.

The bruises from Monday have really come out now. On the bad arm, I have a big swollen green bruise from wrist to just above the elbow. The shoulder, which I had iced immediately, doesn't look great, but looks nowhere near as bad as the one a bit lower on that arm. I'll see the chiropractor today, who can give me a better idea how much damage I did, exactly.

Stepometer

My sweetie and I saw my mom in May. We talked a lot about walking—we were both doing PFit at that point, and had that beginner's zeal. Mom mentioned that she had got a stepometer at McDonalds, and that she was enjoying wearing it.

At that point, I owned a pair of walking shoes and that was it. No pedometer, no heart rate monitor, no garmin, no technical fabric clothes, no hydration system.

Anyways, fast forward to the trip last week. Mom gave me her stepometer. Like the rest of my pedometers, it's off, running about a third high, but it's still kinda fun to see the numbers.

Yesterday, I hit 36 thousand. So that's probably really 24,000 steps. In one day. Not too bad!

25K

Well, I just got back from doing a 25K, or 15.5 miles for those of you playing along at home. I did the whole long, slow distance thing, so it took me over 5 hours.



(The map to the right will give you an idea -- though the purple line is not the route I took)

The weather was beautiful--a perfect day to be outside moving around. I went from the beginning to the end of Alameda Blvd, and then up and around Rocky Butte, and back.

I didn't have any sort of real discomfort until I had been walking about 4 hours, which I thought was great. My goth toe was uncovered and unhappy, and my legs were tired, but otherwise I felt like I could walk on and on.

This route was interesting as there were a number of hills involved, not the least being Rocky Butte. When left to my own devices, I like to charge up hills, which I'm not convinced is the right way to tackle them. I tried today to keep my heart rate at my walking pace, which meant slowing down a bunch--really slow. I was pleased with as well as I did, and surprised how fast I had to scramble to make the heart rate going downhill.

Afterwards, I went to breakfast at my favorite place, that I usually can't get into on the weekends, and then took the bus home. Now I'd like to nap <grin>!

Fresh slate

Well. Yesterday I went for an hour-long walk with Jill, which felt great at the time, but afterwards I had a headache as well as the it-hurts-to-think/move/breathe fullbody sensation. I ended up bailling on the Anthony Bourdain talk and dinner because I felt so icky. I had planned the trip to my mom's around this event. I am seriously bummed.

But today is a new day, right? Fresh slate, all that. I managed to get out of the house at 6:15 and onto the bus downtown, so I made it to the gym by 6:45. It felt like old-home day -- all the Wednesday morning regulars were there. I decided I would do as much of the upperbody workout as I could without causing myself pain, and I did manage to get through a lot of it. And then I got some quality time on the treadmill.

A cool thing -- Mark, the RBF Godfather has created a running blog map. If you want to be listed, Mark has how to participate in his blog, natch.

grumble

I feel, still, pretty stoopid. Oh my gosh, I can't even think and walk down the stairs. This does not bode well for me. So I hurt, almost universally all over. My eyes hurt. I wonder, really, how hard I landed on my head. My walk to the bus this morning hurt.

I'm trying to keep a sense of humor about this, but I'm having a hard time forgiving myself this.

I'm trying to look at the good side of this. I did manage to clean and declutter a quite a bit last night before I did my gymnastics. I brought about half of the clothes upstairs. I have a backpack full of magazines to bring to the gym, and I cleaned up about half a grocery bag of newspapers.

I read a forum thread about buying a treadmill, and then did some further reading at Runner's World where they say, don't put your exercise equipment in the basement—out of sight, out of mind. They're right: I hate my basement and I doubt even with "remodeling" that it would be that pleasant a place to hang out.

Oh. And I got my student loan payment thingee. Payments start next month, and they're 2/3rds of my mortgage cost. Sigh. I get a raise next month, but I doubt it's a 2/3rds of the mortgage type raise.

Sweetie and I had talked about goals over the weekend, and for both of us, we wanted to eat better and eat at home most of the time, unlike our current bad behavior of eating out as a habit. We figured it would save us some cash too, that we could put into the house. Or, the student loan payment.