Ow, Ow, Ow

My recent zeal for stairclimbing has temporarily backfired.  My calves are on fire and I can hardly walk today! OW!

No pain no gain, I guess.  Hopefully I’ll be able to get back to it Monday- just going to keep stretching and relaxing those muscles this weekend.

I’ve also signed on for the 5-mile Heart Walk to be held here in May, so I need to start getting in shape for that.  Since I have no real clue what 5 miles feels like, I’m going to drive the neighborhood today and map out a 3-mile and a 5-mile route for training.

Exercise, Exercise, Exercise!

Food: OK.  Water: Very good. Exercise: Pitiful.

While I’ve dropped the ball on counting my calories, I’m in a routine now where I pretty much have a good idea of what I’m eating and I’m keeping it in line.  Adding fruits and veggies to my proteins and starting to balance it all out now that I’m past the induction phase of low carbing.

I drink my water faithfully, about  100oz a day and I’m really starting to see a difference in my skin.  I’ve always had bad skin and lately, age has started showing as well but after 7 weeks of daily water I’m really pleased with how it looks.  Smoother, less red, overall healthier! Yay, water!

When it comes to exercise, I stink.  I walk or do a flight of stairs at lunch and that’s pretty much my whole routine.  I do think about moving all day and take the long way when I walk around the office, etc. but I haven’t gotten serious about exercising.

So last night, I did the numbers:

At my current level of activity/eating, I’ll reach my goal weight in 20 weeks.  Yuk…

If I step it up to 3 days of at least 30 minutes of intense exercise, I’ll reach my goal weight in about 16 weeks.  A little better…

If I really get serious about exercising and put in 5-6 workouts a week, I can be slim and healthy in 12 weeks.  12 weeks!  3 short months and I can be pulling the size 6’s out of the back of the closet!  Now that’s motivating.

I’m off work today and off to the gym!

Plan Your Walking

I’m not talking about yesterday.  Suffice it to say, I had to bake a birthday cake and brownies for my youngest’s 6th birthday today and the temptation was too much.  We’ll call it a bad day and move on…

My co-worker sent me a link yesterday to Gmap Pedometer  a cool little mashup where you can set a route in your neighborhood or park or wherever you walk and get not only the mileage but if you input your weight you can get a calories-used estimate as well as an elevation map.

I find it motivating to learn that when I walk my little neighborhood route, I’m burning around 140 calories! And, keeping in mind that if I go faster I can burn more calories in less time, I can use this baseline to push myself a little harder when I’m out.

The Uphill Battle

I really, really do plan on going to the Gym.  I will.  The thing is, there is an indoor pool there and the kids love it so it’s not like hey-I’ll-dash-in-and-out, it’s more like a half hour of gathering swimsuits and gear and knowing once I’m done working out, there’s another hour  of supervising swim time… plus, I have a school carnival meeting tonight.  (Why oh why did I say I’d be in charge?)

In any case, my best bet for some exercise today was lunch.  I probably should have gotten out and walked but it’s cooooold. (Really, it’s like 45′F or something! That’s cold for these parts.)  So I decided to do some stairclimbing.

I had a good idea of where the stairs are and after poking around (and opening some doors I shouldn’t have) I found them.  I realized as the door clicked shut behind me… it locked from the other side.  I pictured them finding my dry, dusty skeleton in the stairwell years later before calming the dramatics and realizing I’d just have to set off the fire alarm on the door to get out if I had to.  (Oh, the shame!)

In the meantime, I started hoofing it.  4 flights of concrete stairs up and I thought I might collapse. Oh… my… gosh. How did I get this out of shape?  I stood gasping for breath at the top step and thought to myself that at least I can say I pushed my heart rate to the max today.

I stuck with it but on the way down from my third trip to the top, my legs started wobbling pretty bad. Enough!  I wondered how I was going to get out…

I tried a few doors and eventually found one unlocked that led back into the building.  Outside this door, I found a staff bathroom that I didn’t even know existed!  Apparently it used to be public but in a redesign of how the traffic flows, it got cut off. Exploring can turn up some interesting stuff.  I followed a mouse maze of halls and eventually got back out into the building.

Heart rate properly increased and legs shaky, I spent the rest of my hour in one of the comfy chairs in the staff room listening to the others talk about the huge container of wonderful homemade hot chocolate vanilla chai mix someone had brought in and how it made a great latte when you put it in coffee…  who needs it?  Right?

A Walk in the Park

Um… a walk by the park, actually.  I had to mail my rebate form for my Tivo (oh, you’ve got to hear this!  I bought a Tivo in November for $42, bought the service for a year at $120 and I get a rebate of $170. Yes, they are paying me $8 to have Tivo service for a year.  Cool, no?) so I decided to walk the block and a half to the library.

When lunchtime rolled around… I was jonesing for mexican.  I’ve been really good lately and I started justifying it in my head… I’ll skip the chips and just get a chicken soft taco… how bad could that be?  But I didn’t. Score one for me!

Instead I changed into my sneakers and hoofed it to the post office, dropped off my letter, walked by the park, and came back to eat my Lean Cuisine in the staff room with a large bottle of water.  Yay me!  (Gotta celebrate the little victories)