Faster than a Galapagos Tortoise

 

The great thing about technology is this: With just a few clicks, I can find out interesting facts about the Galapagos Tortoise, which I knew was a slow-moving creature, but until today I had no idea just. how. slow. that could be. 

Did you know it would take over six hours for a Galapagos Tortoise to go one mile? For real. I'm assuming that it would take a fair amount of motivation, as well. Food perhaps, or an especially sexy Tortoise of the opposite gender to wink knowingly and urge the poor beast along.

Hormonal tortoises aside, did you know it didn't take me six hours to go one mile today? I'm almost as surprised as you are. In fact, I covered just over one and a half miles in 30 minutes today. Hey, I can't help it if I'm setting land-speed records....for tree sloths...

I'm actually super happy I got to run today!  (Ahem. I suppose I'm using the term "run" loosely, as noted by the aforementioned distance and time.) So at this pace, I will be able to cover an 8 mile hellish obstacle course after approximately 67 years of training.

Seems legit.

Here are the treadmills at my gym, looking all pretty and bright underneath the skylight:

                                                                        

Here's my treadmill. I didn't get a shot of me while using it because, duh, I can't jog and take my picture at the same time.

That's my drink! (You care.)

Annnnnd...voilà, la pièce de résistance (which is a fancy French way of saying "This is the cool part"): My mileage. Isn't technology awesome? The machine tells important things like how much ground I would have covered, had I been on the ground (and not on a, let's face it, slightly easier smooth surface with a moving track to keep me going), and it tells me how many calories I burned. Today it shows that I went over a mile and a half! Most of which was accomplished by actual running. Well, maybe half of which. Okay, not quite half, probably just under half. Possibly a third. But it was running. Okay, it was jogging. Almost speedwalking but not quite. It was definitely a jog, even if it was slow.

Jogging happened here today! Well, something happened.

At least it wasn't Galapagos Tortoise slow.

 

Victory and Defeat in the Time of 60 minutes

Didn't do a class today at the gym, instead went on my own with the surreptitious plan of trying a bit of a jog on the treadmill. Surreptitious, as in, I was going to try to sneak it in on the body before the knee could figure out what was going on and put an end to it. 

First, 30 minutes on the Nordic track machine: 

 

Music: Interpol, "Say Hello to the Angels" - Killers, "Sam's Town" (not the crappy acoustic version either!) - NIN, "Head Like A Hole" - Pink Floyd, "Run Like Hell" and AC/DC "Dirty Deeds (Done Dirt Cheap)"

After all good and worked out on this machine, I figured it was time. 

Time to get back on a treadmill. Time to take the knee out for a little jog.

I should've taken a picture of how pretty that treadmill looked, bathed in soft white light from the skylight above. I grinned to myself as I got on the machine and started it up. 

After a slow start, I punched it up to a whopping 4.5 mph. Found out the knee is most definitely NOT down with that plan. Slowed down, increased the incline. For the remainder of the workout I kept messing with incline and speed, to make it just challenging enough that I was actually working out and not just lollygagging along at a useless staring-at-the-art-in-a-museum pace. 

Towards the end of my 30 minutes, I had this great idea: I would sneak up the speed little by little, till a slow jog would be achieved.  

Hooray! This seems to have worked! My new theory now is that the knee has to be gently cajoled into a jog, and the slower the transition, the better.

So, imagine me, smiling like a fool, this huge triumphant grin on my face as I am jogging along at a positively glacial pace, when all of a sudden the machine stops. Out of the blue. How did this happen? Not smiling anymore. Stupid machine. What in the world?....

And I see it. I see it. The stupid thing that keeps the treadmill on. Most treadmills I've dealt with have a sort of key you insert into a slot, and that's what keeps it on. But noooo, not this one. This treadmill - apparently all of them at the gym - have instead a ridiculous little bobbly thing with a magnet on it that sticks onto this shallow indention. That's what keeps the machine on. It looks like a little Pokemon ball. Apparently I swiped that thing by accident - must've been while I was raising my arms in victory, like a runner completing a marathon - and that's what turned my machine off.

I was just a tad bit miffed at that point. I slapped the stupid machine with my towel, then went to ask the manager if the lost information could be retrieved. Because, you see, clearly the most important thing is not the workout, but that I can take a picture of the readout afterward. Alas, the manager told me what I already had guessed: that you can't get the information back once it's been turned off. 

Man.

But hey! I got to jog a little! That was kind of awesome.

 

Live from the grocery store: BIG NEWS!!!

Reached a milestone today....a slightly embarrassing one, but in a good way. More about that in a moment. 

The big news? That I got while leaving the grocery store?....I have been offered a job! It's for a full-time French position. Surprisingly, I think this is probably the PERFECT job for me this year. I'll be teaching French 1. That's it. Not French 2, no IB or AP French, just...French 1. It's surprising to me to think this is perfect, because for a long time I was soooo convinced I really wanted only to teach upper level French. But, see, upper level French usually means you're teaching French 2, 3, 4, and maybe 5, plus AP and/or IB French.

If you're a teacher - you will understand when I say that upper level French means I could have 5, 6 or even 7 preps. If you're not a teacher, well, let me just say that each prep requires a lot of work, so the more preps you have, the more work you have. Three or four preps is kind of a lot. More than that is nearly insane.That's why it's a blessing to have only one prep. Some teachers work for years to get to the point where they only have one or two preps. And that's why teaching upper level French would be a daunting proposition, as there would be SO many preps.

So I'll be teaching French 1, on a campus with what appears to be a very supportive administration, as well as a foreign language section leader I think I will really enjoy working for. I will be assigned a mentor - probably a real mentor, someone who is actually helpful and willing to spend time with me - and I will also be collaborating with other electives teachers during our mutual conference periods. This is SO different from my previous experience! 

Now, for the other news, which happened while I was still at the grocery store:  my shorts almost fell off me! Right there by the cheese and sandwich meat! I could feel my shorts sliding down, then a little more down, and I had to stop to actually pull them up so they wouldn't fall all the way down. Woo-hoo!

Now, if only I could get my thighs to stop rubbing together...

Friend Vacation, and Weight Update!

When you go on vacation, do you worry about keeping up a healthy diet? 

What about if you don't leave to go on vacation, but the vacation comes to you? Let me explain: I had a dear friend in town this weekend, and I knew we would be busy sightseeing / hanging out / possibly doing tourist-y kinds of things. That's kind of like a vacation, isn't it?

I was worried about being able to work out - this turned out not to be much of an issue - and also, I was worried that I would be able to keep up with logging my nutrition. 

Well. I didn't need to worry about working out. We spent so much time walking (HOURS and HOURS, I'm not even kidding) around the museum and the aquarium, I still managed to burn calories. And food? We were so busy gabbing we didn't have a lot of time left over to stuff our faces. Although, we did go out for a rather expensive (calorie-wise) Mexican dinner with my family....but no biggie, it was just one meal. 

Here's a pic of us at the aquarium:

My friend left today. Which makes me sad, because I miss him, and I miss the freedom we had when we were younger to just hang out pretty much whenever we wanted to. Things are different now. I've discovered it's hard to hang out when you live half a nation apart. Also, it's hard to hang out when you have children, or grandchildren, or actual, grown-up-type jobs. (Between us we have all these things.)

So after a brief moment of staring out the window when he left, and after wallowing nostalgically in some '80's music, I went to the gym to work out. Because I'm not a teenager anymore. (And I have the waistline to prove it!) 

First, I figured it was time to actually weigh myself and take measurements. I haven't done this yet. I did weigh myself a couple months ago, but haven't bothered since then...I was too horrified by how much I weighed, and I was hoping that by avoiding the scale it would somehow magically make the weight start melting off of me. This doesn't work, just in case you were wondering. Anyway, the last time I weighed myself - and if I were to be honest, I might admit it was more than a "couple" months ago; it was probably around 6 months ago - I weighed (ahem) 171 lbs. I knew I'd gained weight since then so when I started on the Really Cool Website To Help Me Get Healthy Again and Get In Shape For The Spartan Race (Let's call it the RCW, or Really Cool Website, for short), I said I weighed 180 pounds. 

That may or may not have been the case. I don't know. I will never know, because I tried to pretend I didn't need to weigh myself (because guessing is so much better, right?), so I just assumed my top weight was about 180. (It was around that, though, for sure. But it could've been more. I'm positive it wasn't less, because my clothes were fitting even worse than they had at 170.) 

I took my measurements at home, and let's just say the results were not inspiring. Moving on.

My gym has this really nice scale. It's like the scale at the doctor's office, the one with the bar at the top with the little weights you move around until the arrow on the right floats upward.

Good news! I've lost at least 6 pounds, and I'm strong enough to actually move the pin on the free weights to 25 lbs!  Hooray! 

Also, my fat pants are fitting kinda loose now!!! Yay me!! That's not a direct result of weighing and measuring, either, in case you were wondering. No: I've noticed the pants were loose the past few days. This means, I've actually lost some weight. Hooray!

To celebrate, I had some chocolate wine tonight. 

Okay, I know what you're thinking. 

"Why would you celebrate your weight loss by consuming a calorie-laden alcoholic beverage? Doesn't that sort of defeat the purpose?" And you may have a point. But I was feeling quite sorry for myself that my friend was gone, and that we're not teenagers anymore, and that there is not, in fact, music still on MTV. So I think you would agree with me that a judicious glass of wine was necessary to help me wallow in the feelings of being sad and old.  

And I will STILL lose weight!!! Because, guess what, I'm still tracking everything I eat or drink, and I'm still working out!! So there!!!

And now, for something completely different.

We will be using Time4Writing as a summer writing program for the next couple of months.  We are excited to get started with the interactive lessons.  Our online tutor will correct our work and give us writing tips on how to sharpen our writing skills.  Come visit in a few weeks to see how we like it.

Supplements

Supplements, in a day:

Breakfast

 

This is the morning routine. Before breakfast, B-12 with vitamin C, creatine mixed with sugar-free drink, and chromium picolinate. Then, with breakfast, multi-vitamin and evening primrose oil.

Oh yeah - also, a daily antihistamine. In the morning.

Lunchtime

 Creatine with a sugar-free drink, and Ibuprofen. 

Dinner

 Creatine in a drink, and iron.

Bedtime

Calcium and Benadryl - apparently they work well together to help you sleep. And Benadryl helps me stay asymptomatic when the allergen counts are high.

Worst 3 Musketeers ever

This is the WORST 3Musketeers Bar I've ever had. Simply terrible. Don't do it, don't eat this. 

Worst. 3 Musketeers. EVER.

If you really want a 3 Musketeers Bar, do yourself a favor and go get the real deal. Indulge in the 3 Musketeers Bar's traditional airy sweetness wrapped in mouthwatering milk chocolate goodness. Please. Please, in the name of All That Is Holy! Please enjoy the real thing. Do it for yourself. Do it for all the dieters in the world who try with all their might to pretend that food tastes just as good now is it ever did, but that's a lie, because compared to junk food - compared to the 3 Musketeers Bar - healthy food is about negative-100 on a 1 to 10 scale of yumminess. 

Most importantly, do it for me, the chubby lady who can no longer indulge in the chocolatey perfection of the 3 Musketeers Bar, and who devoutly wishes 3 Musketeers were in the business of making protein bars that taste like a 3 Musketeers.

Looks can be deceiving. This is not, in fact, a candy bar.