Another new toy!

For the first time in 17 years of working, I had President’s Day off!
Eric and I had a wonderful weekend, full of Olympic watching, South Park watching, friend hanging outing, Parent’s Anniversary Dinner having, and one very long “quick” trip to REI for some sale shopping. And as mentioned before… no SIM playing.

I wanted to go to REI to buy 1 thing. A Heart Rate Monitor. My brother has been trying to get me to buy an HRM for a while, telling me how it’s the only way to truly measure your body’s effort and capacity, blah blah blah.
If you read back a few months ago, I decided to torture my physical and emotional self by going for a gymnastics workout. This was a reality check for me. I am not 12 anymore. I am 31, and have a completely different body then I did when I was young, and athletic. I may like to think that I’m still athletic, but when I'm winded from climbing the 1 flight of stairs I have to go up at work, home and at BART, hello… that’s not athletic! I’m out of shape. I have been for years. I bitch about the pounds and the inches and about how the new jeans that I finally gave in and bought a size larger, are already too tight. But do I do anything about it? No.

I still eat crap:
breakfast – tea with cream and Splenda(that’s something right?) and a bag of Cheetos
lunch – salad (with bread and cheese of course!)
snack – Coke and Cheetos (I try to limit this to one day a week, well at least the Coke part)
dinner – anything I can make really quickly or we’ll go out

I belong to a gym, but I haven’t been since last year.

A few weeks ago I bought a pair of running shoes (my last excuse to not run). I’m going to start running!

About a month ago, we started our Sunday mornings with a brisk walk around the park by our house, and then I’d try to run around the park as far as I could go, and then walked around again as a cool down. I built up to running around the park 1 and a half times. Then the next couple of times we went out I’d say that I wanted to just talk, or I had a cramp, or some other excuse, and we’d just walk…briskly mind you.

Then I got the HRM. According to my calculated optimum heart beat rate range for loosing weight & building cardiovascular fitness, I don’t have to do much of anything. Cause you see… I’m that out of shape! I walk up the stairs at home and the darn alarm is going off that I’ve already topped out of my range. If you didn’t know, the more fit you are, the more you can do without increasing your heart rate. So the fact that I am winded at 20-some steps, tells y’all that I’m no teenager anymore.

So last Monday, I ran, walked, danced around the house for 32 minutes while keeping my heart rate in my “fitness zone”. That little piece of irritatingly uncomfortable plastic is a total motivator! It even yells at you if you haven’t exercised in 3 days.

Of course I didn’t pick it up again until this last Sunday (because 30 minutes of dancing around the house and walking up and down the stairs, can make a person amazingly sore!). I found that if I speed walked (yes with the swinging arms and the wiggly ass), I could keep my heart going at my optimum rate for weight lose and cardio fitness. So we walked about 4 miles, which took a little over an hour. Woo Hoo!

Let’s see if I keep this up. Cheer me on! I finally have something to write about.