Hiccups

The last two Crossfit challenges that I have participated in were accompanied by, and my participation in was subsequently shut down, by random life changing situations. Spartan Challenge was my thyroid going ape shit, no exercise for three months. Not one push up, fast walk, don't even imagine yourself running kind of no exercise mandate. Turkey Sprint challenge was Tony's passing about a week before competition. After the week of round the clock care and emotional pillaging, there was nothing left in me. Now, three weeks into the I AM CROSSFIT, my boyfriend's father falls into a coma and unfortunately dies.

WTF. Who writes this shit?

My energy is sapped and my focus is truncated. Grief takes the wind out of a person immediately, robs you of the fire, it keeps your knees firmly planted on the ground. This situation is different and slightly indirect, thankfully, but not without a decent quantity of emotional stress. A very large portion of my brain is occupied by my partner and his well being right now. Packing together the focus and intention to workout like a beast is regretfully impossible until he makes it to the next step.

I won't stop like the previous times, that is the different part of this story. I will not allow it to completely shut me down and I will continue through this challenge with as much as I can offer.

But really.

WTF.

I pulled off the impossible....

I ate lunch at a Mexican restaurant and did not eat one tortilla chip. Not one!

It's gonna be a UFC smackdown with....myself?

Man o man I have a tricky brain. This week has been so very difficult maintaining a balance with the exercise and diet. I know what my red zones are now, and am starting to gain speed on cutting them off at the pass! Tired and hungry basically equals goal-death. My bottom lip may as well be completely turned inside out and quivering, that's how childish I start to feel. There is so much wrestling happening! It's a cage-fight-to-the-death between who I am striving to be and that little whiner that was nurtured with bottles of wine, cigarettes and taco hell in early adulthood. I am winning, but boy is she tough for being so out of shape....

Hugs not flautas and beer.
Hugs not flautas and beer.
Hugs not flautas and beer.
Hugs not flautas and beer.

For the love of cruciferous things

Yes, have some.

If it looks good on paper

It will probably end up being a total bitch to deal with.

That was my story this evening doing the I Am Crossfit workout. All valid excuses aside, I now have a very definite understanding of how to improve on workouts like the one I had tonight. 400m run, 15 pull ups, 7 hang cleans (65#)-3 total rounds....I made it to the 400m run of the third round, with most disappointingly, a bad attitude towards myself. Erika Jeanne, Erika Jeanne...

1. I have to get faster on those runs. The runs need to be easy and breezy instead of painful and long. This will allow me to spend more time on the other, more demanding movements, which I tend to like more anyway.

2. I need to really hone in on the mental cycle I go through during those workouts. When do I start to feel like I'm failing and how can I cut that off? With the zone diet, I realized that dinner needs to be prepped and ready when I get home at 6:30 in order to keep me from justifying convenience food. So much of this exercise/diet process is preparing yourself for that mental crunch. It takes practice to believe in yourself.

3. Feel good about upping the weight, even if it means sacrificing your time. I should never, ever feel bad about this. I am thankful that I regularly up my weight to keep things as challenging as possible, even if it feels like I have been standing still because everything is always so damn hard.

God I hurt like hell. The 65#'s slipped from my hands in the second round and I jammed one of my fingers and managed to hit just above my knee. I will have a really decent bruise tomorrow I'm sure. No structural damage, just soft tissue, which will heal soon enough. I think I'm most pissed about those pull ups being so hard. Even though I did 100 of them yesterday (and decreased my resistance) I still expected to pop those out like nothing.... Ambitious much? Ha....ok, in EIGHT WEEKS, this workout will be mine, sub 12 minutes. Trust.

Wow

*Sigh*

Oh Dear

Want

Cellular Structures

I've branched out from the diatoms onto looking at human cellular structures.

Brain Cells:




Heart Cells:




White Blood Cells:




Mitochondria:


Mitochondria have been on my hot list for almost 20 years now, read about their function here

Why so complicated?

Lies! Lies! Lies!

Last night I was waiting in a very crowded after hours clinic to get a rare dose of antibiotics for an even rarer sinus infection. I amused myself by reading a copy of Health magazine, with their obligatory "Drop Two Sizes in 6 Weeks" diet plan emblazoned across the cover. I most certainly do not have the answers for every person. We are all blessed with being different and needing different things to sustain ourselves comfortably. What I do know is that we're all basically lazy when it comes to being healthy. We want the fastest and easiest way to get in shape. Fair enough, I do too. The thought of being on a treadmill gives me a headache and a laundry list of excuses why I couldn't possibly fit it in to my schedule.

So anyway, I'm reading this exercise/diet plan and the first thing I notice is how terribly complicated it is. My brain flat lined three sentences in. Four minutes of light activity on the eliptical machine followed by spurts of fast movements for 10 minutes then slower speed for 10 minutes. Repeat for 30 minutes. Blah Blah Blah Or something like that. They had similar suggestions for other cardio equipment, equally as boring and difficult to memorize. The diet plan was just for seven days, broken into six different meals and it would never work. It is basically seven days of diet trickery. See! This isn't a diet! You can still have sugar and crap! Just tiny little portions all through the day! You are not dieting, you are not dieting...you. are. not. dieting.

Diets never work because some little defiant part of you expects to go back to the way you have always eaten after the target weight has been reached. There is little emphasis on the need for a mental shift. What's the first thing that you treat yourself with after you reach your fitness goals? Ice Cream? Pizza? Why? Because you justify the relationship now. You worked sooooooo hard, you totally deserve it. Sound familiar? Yeah, food is reward, not just for keeping us alive. If we really were concerned solely with nutrition, we would never have to find ways to prepare kale, you'd just eat it and love it.

The Special K challenge commercials are going to make my head explode.
WalMart telling me that eating healthy costs less when shopping there is sick.
SlimQuick shots, and special diet water concern me deeply.
Any eating plan that includes ranch dressing, fat free or high octane, should be fired.
Bread=Sugar, not Bread=Fiber.
The world might be a happier place if people ate butter instead of partially hydrogenated oil (aka margarine). Yes! Butter!

We all have reasons why we can't take that next step, or why our journey is going to be extra hard. We're older, or hurt, or too tired, or busy, or whatever. It's easy to fail with so much misinformation out there, and that can compound how powerless we often feel against ourselves.

My good friend Catherine and I go back almost 6 years now (wow!) and we've seen one another transition from drunk college days to considering Smoothie King as a nutritious substitute for lunch....oooof....my stomach just turned....to quipping about Crossfit for hours. We often discuss how sad it makes us to hear things like "skip the avocado, don't eat the yolk, use spray instead of butter, eat fat free ice cream......." Big frowny faces. We worked out together at 24 Hour Fitness a few years ago for over a year. Two to three days a week, hour and a half of strategy and machines. We used 5lb weights! Ha! Funny we thought lifting 5lb weights was going to give us any results however small. Losing weight and getting in shape is hard work. No lie there. It is a difficult thing to do, but it doesn't have to be so complicated.

How I long to love you

Not all of the exercises we do at CrossFit make me gleeful. There are a handful of little red headed step children that make me groan a little every time I see their names scrawled across the whitewash board....

Wall Ball
Burpees
400m Run/Sprints
Overhead Squat
Box Jumps

I want to love them, trust me on that one. I think the killer is that I don't feel like I'm that good at them. These are the exercises that really bring out my inner complainer to the n-th degree, and I spend more time parenting my thoughts than actually doing the exercise. One of the goals I have for the next couple of months is to work exponentially hard at gaining the confidence I need to fall in love with these guys. Also, I need to make that parenting voice a little more constructive and less critical. No one likes to be bitched at. The huge difference between who I am now and who I was a year ago, is that instead of avoiding, I want to step up and create the change that I want.

My one year with CrossFit is three weeks away.....omg.