A quick update while I hydrate

I did end up downloading the Expereal app the other day and so far I've been exceedingly mellow at all the times it chooses to ask.

It gives me a reminder a set number of (random) times a day and I'm supposed to record my mood at that time. I set it to three because I like multiples of three and six just seemed too often. So far it's not terribly intrusive but I wonder if there may end up being a bit of bias as all of the times I'm likely to be too busy to stop and record my mood are likely to be the times I'm doing something really cool or really crappy.

I'm currently waiting for the 32 oz of water I just drank (just now!) to cycle through me enough to go to the gym without fearing a potty emergency halfway through my workout. I think a lot of my problems with running in former years can be pinned on chronic dehydration so I have a strict hydrate before working out rule.

I have a 32 oz water bottle which I try to fill and empty into my face twice a day. I have to have at least finished one bottle full before a run (more if it's later in the day) and I have to be peeing clear or close to it.

Not what I would call ideal running form
image via http://werner.fm/post/26471931081/bathroom-occupied-taken-with-instagram-at

I'm about two thirds of the way through the 5k to 10 program and today's workout will have a short tempo run, so here's hoping I can clear some of that out soon and get to the gym in that golden window between the after work and the after-dinner crowds. Looking forward to trying out some new tech today so hopefully more on that later.

Oh, oh, oh! While I'm thinking of it!

I'd be awfully jazzed if those of you who haven't already would go like me on Facebook!

Click this text to go to my Facebook page

There's a Facebook widget link over on the right side of the page for those immediate reward button clicky types.

I have been starting to post a bit of extra content on Facebook that I hope you will enjoy - mostly random links I find and the occasional pithy comment.

Click it! I know you're out there and I'd love to know more about who you are!

It is by caffeine alone I set my mind in motion...

September Blog Challenge Day 21 - Are you a coffee drinker?

Just reading the question makes me want coffee.

I like my coffee like I like my men... roasted and ground fresh daily in small batches???

It's funny; though I think of myself as a heavy coffee drinker - I only drink one small cup a day. I just can't tolerate the caffeine anymore. Apparently there's only so much caffeine buzz one body can take in one lifetime and I pretty much blew my limit before twenty five. I am no longer able to handle the epic coffee drinking I did in high school and college when I drank POTS of coffee every day (if it was too hot for coffee I opted for Mountain Dew).
 

Coffee Buzz by Terry Border

There was a point in time around my mid 20s that I sort of accidentally quit caffeine; I was depressed and unemployed and I wasn't TRYING to quit caffeine, but, well...

Admittedly not terribly funny when it's ACTUALLY your life

Between minimal caffeine intake for a few months and some heavy anxiety problems I became extremely sensitive to it and unless I had a way to burn it off quickly I could pretty much guarantee a panic attack from anything over 6 oz of coffee. Once I got a job again I could not bear the idea of a working life without coffee. I've weaned myself back on to it slowly over several years, but I still have to be extremely careful not to overdo it.

I was actually up to two cups a day for a while but often didn't finish the second and certainly didn't need the caffeine, so I've recently cut back down to one.

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Oh, small note: happy over 500 page views! Woohoo!

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What active/fitness related things did I do today?

Nothing yet, but the plan for this evening is to bring the Boyfriend and the Former Housemate to Super Runner's Shop in Huntington to get their gaits looked at and to start looking into a bad weather/trail shoe for me. Then onward to dinner at a Mexican place, maybe some Fro-Yo, and probably ending the night with some live music.

Water bottle problem solved... with one teensy drawback

The green bottle on left is the one I took with me the last several runs. It has an approximately 22 oz capacity, a flip top lid, and a freezable insert thingy (not shown) for keeping your water cold. It also has a clip which I have attached to a silicone cause bracelet (Go Army, in this case) so that I can drop and recover the bottle easily whenever I need my hand free. 

It's lovely as a general water bottle, but for running? Frankly, it sucks.

• The size is too large for my hand so I get hand cramps 
• it's overly heavy when filled but overly sloshy when not
• I don't like cold water so the chill pack thingy is a waste(admittedly nice for days at the beach and the like though)
• the hole is too small so I feel like I never get enough water out for the amount of time I'm holding my breath to drink
• I have to tilt my head back to drink so I lose sight of the road and always get water on/up my nose  
• the lid is going to take one of my teeth out. 

And this is the least awkward of my water bottles!

Now witness the power of this fully armed and operational water bottle

And so I perused the sporting goods during a trip to Target (ostensibly to check out the Halloween stuff) and found the most perfect bottle EVAR... except for one little detail. 

• It's a reasonable 12 oz capacity so it wont be too heavy
• a nice narrow bottleneck so I should be able to hold it comfortably
• an old school Lunch Box Thermos style pop up straw so I can drink from it naturally with my head forward
• a sturdy loop I can attach a lariat to for quick hands free recovery
•  a chic, classy, 360° silk screened Disney/Pixar Cars logo (I hated that movie). *sigh*

That's what I get for having wee tiny child hands I suppose.

The good news is that the Go Army cause bracelet fits around it perfectly... so looks like it's time to start collecting cause bracelets for a ghetto hack silicone bottle cozy!

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September Blog Challenge Day 16: How do you measure your fitness progress?

First and most direct; I measure my distance and time via both the C25K and Nike+ apps on my phone and try to keep in mind the relative effort I am putting into each workout. Compared to when I started I am doing pretty much twice the distance at one and a half times the speed with less effort.

Second: I see the way my clothes fit. In five months I have gone from nearly needing a new wardrobe to digging stuff out of the back of my closet that I probably should have gotten rid of years ago.

Third: I do things that would have been exhausting six months ago and they are simply a good effort. Spending days moving house, walking around a museum for a day, dancing to every song until last call.

Fourth (and probably most abstract) I look at my forearms and wrists: when I am fit I have delicate (but not scrawny) forearms with fine boned wrists and a pleasant level of musculature. Despite my small size I feel that my arms look willowy and refined. When I am starting to add too many pounds my forearms become soft and featureless, my wrists become a dimple on the way to my hand.

I get it when my body adds weight to my midsection, that's where people naturally gain weight; but when fat starts distributing to spots like my wrists and the backs of my knees I know that I have simply exceeded capacity. As the finer structures in my body re-emerge I feel like I'm literally emerging from some sort of shell or cocoon.

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My run today: C25K week 8 day 3
3.26 miles at 11:38 per mile (full workout per Nike+ 3.67 miles at 13:00 per mile - I planned a longer route and walked the remaining 0.41 miles)

New route beat the pants off of the old one, beautiful houses, wide roads, fewer crazy intersections, there was even a horse pasture! No horses out, but there was also a LARGE dropping on the road nearby, so either the horse farm is active or someone in the neighborhood has a pet bear.

My pacing is getting WAY better and I dropped into my stride very early. I still feel like a bellows from breathing so deeply but that is starting to feel a little more natural too. I almost started running again to finish out my route when the C25K workout ended but I figure there is plenty of time for that sort of thing later.

What moved you today?

Hard run today on a couple of levels.

First and foremost a wonderful person has left our world as of this morning and I mourn her loss.
When you have a couple of miles all to yourself with little but the rhythm of your body and thoughts to keep you company it's natural to reflect on things I think. After a day marked by a number of purposeful distractions it was no surprise that my mind turned back to her.

I felt like I had an awful lot of unrelenting me time to think about things. Today marked the transition to the "say goodbye to walk breaks" portion of the C25K program with a longer run by five minutes than I've done previously in the program *coughs* Or since about high school, and any running then was away from getting in trouble rather than toward health. I was SO good at hopping fences though and I find this really comforting when I get uncomfortable with how slow a car is passing. But I digress.

Humidity was high with an Air Quality Index of 110 (aka "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups"), and keeping down to a reasonable pace was hard. I think I was just itching to get done with it and move on to something else, so I kept speeding up subtly and then catching myself. Consequently I spent a lot of time even more winded than I needed to be. My legs felt pretty good after the first mile, but I couldn't really catch a good rhythm and every breath felt about as nourishing as breathing warm jello.

If you don't recognize this scene get up and watch The Abyss. Yes, right now.
Wasn't that awesome? Moving onward...

I also think I may need to start bringing water along with me. Despite a concerted effort to drink a metric butt-tonne of it during the day (I try to make sure I'm peeing completely clear by the time I head out, aren't you glad you know that?) I always feel completely parched by halfway through and I've noticed a growing issue with burping and nausea by the end of my run. I am NOT a puker and yet I have felt pretty close a few times now. I thought it was an issue of eating too late but really an hour and a half wait should be sufficient and if this is to be believed it may very well be due to mild dehydration. I really don't know how I want to deal with that as I already feel like I'm strapping a million things on with more to come, but at least I know that I can deal with a belt.

In all today's run felt pretty grueling, but every time I started getting really frantic about it that little voice popped into my head saying things like "At least you can run" or "You're not in pain, this is not even in the same universe as pain. You're not in danger, this is simple discomfort, suck it up and stop whining". I know these were coming from a pretty morbid place and in the long run I would prefer to find other sources of motivation, but for today that's what my brain gave me to work with, so that's what I used.

The woman I mourn was a do-er and a helper, so I hope to move forward in that spirit and keep alive her years of encouragement rather than the fragility of her existence, but for today I'm going to stick with the fact that this totally sucks, cancer can go screw, and I really wish she was still here with us outside of our hearts too.

What's the weirdest thing you've ever used as motivation?

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My run today: C25K week 6 day 3

2.72 miles at 13:01 per mile

As previously mentioned I need more air and more water, but I think I would prefer to have them more separated out then what the atmosphere is giving me to work with right now. I could deal without the nausea too but my legs are doing really good, a bit grumpy for the first mile but once I get past that I'm pretty set.

Nothing in and nothing out equals equilibrium... right?

That's how it should work anyway, right? Homeostasis I say!

Anyone who hangs out with me for any period of time figures out pretty quickly that I don't like to pee.  It's not a OCD thing, or medical, or anything like that; I just don't like to interrupt what I'm doing for any kind of *ahm* administrative intake or output. I don't like taking time out for meals either. *shrugs*

For the most part this is not a problem since I am a big fan of finger foods and am not a beverage chugger. I eat at my desk, I make one cup of coffee last an insanely long time (seriously, all day) and I hit the WC when utterly necessary... it's all good. Occasionally a coworker pokes fun at me for still not getting up when I've just said I had to go for the third time, but that's the price one pays for uninterrupted work.

Well, until I started running in record high year for NY heat and humidity, that is.

I know, I know... it could be a sunny 115 in Texas, or India or somewhere similarly tarantula strewn, but it is often like living in a bowl of invisible pea soup here  (or clam chowder if it's low tide!) and that's still no fun, and more importantly it messes with my whole homeostasis thing because I am forced to sweat. *shakes fist*


I'm trying to be better about water (yuck) so I set up my own version of these bottles I found on Pinterest because... well okay, maybe I am a little OCD-ish sometimes.

I figured if I have a bottle staring at me with time goals on it that I may be missing RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF ME I am more likely to drink it. Except I only have one bottle, and it's smaller, so I have three sets of times, and they are all smeary because I tried to protect the marker with nail polish and it smeared and...

*ahm* Nope, no untoward obsessiveness here... moving onward...

So much to absolutely no one's surprise the mind game worked and I am now drinking (almost) all the water I am supposed to on any given day. Interesting side effect: I am now drinking WAY less coffee and I have pretty much zero interest in sugary beverages. I do however still drink water like it's medicine though, chugged 8 oz at a time.

I know it's better for me in the long run (and my skin is way happier) but the peeing, she still vexes me.

Did you have to change any odd habits when you started running/exercising?

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My run today: C25K week 5 day 1

2.30 miles at 13:06 per mile

Finally moving into new territory again, this week should be a doozy since there's a different set of walk/run intervals each day (and NO walking for 20 minutes other than warmup/cooldown on day three!! ack!)

Hamstring and calves were a bit tight but my left hamstring seems to be relaxing a bit.
It was hard to keep pace down to a reasonable enough level to know I would have something left to speed up at the end but I had enough to *run* my last minute and a half and I'm still doing negative splits so I guess I succeeded.

My knees seem to still be good with no braces! This is such an incredible relief!