Empty nest syndrome

Good evening everyone! How are you enjoying your weekend? I am trying to make it as productive as I can. Wednesday and Thursday were regular work days for me, but I took Friday off, because my brother was getting the keys to his first own home. That’s right, my little brother bought his own apartment! He asked me to accompany him to the notary where the house was officially put on his name and the keys were exchanged. after that we went to check out his house and take measurements for some stuff. It is a really nice apartment and I am positive that he will enjoy it. Now my parents get to suffer from empty nest syndrome, because my brother was the last one leaving home. But my mom said it was worse when my sister and I both left at the same time (my sister for college and I for a student exchange year and to college directly after that), so I guess they will be fine. In the evening we went out for dinner to celebrate. We went to a buffet restaurant where they have everything in buffet-style, from starters to deserts. AND, it is very good! Quite a lot of wine was consumed as well.

Therefore I kicked myself out of bed the next morning and shove my bootay in the car to go to the gym to attend my first spinning class in months! Man, o man, it was tough! Count the following factors in:

- The Saturday class is one of the toughest spinning classes
- It is a morning class and I perform better at night
- I didn’t eat well during the previous day and then had a HUGE dinner with a lot of not so super healthy foods
- I drank way too much (for me, at least)
- Though I do enough aerobic exercise, I haven’t been to spinning class for a long time.

And it is no wonder I looked and felt like this after class:

But after a shower and a Green Monster I was feeling great again! We did groceries and then I worked for most of the afternoon. We had pizza for dinner (this week really cannot get a lot worst healthy eating-wise) and I am left to enjoy my evening. The Boyfriend has his last night shift tonight and then his schedule changes to day shifts only, so after tonight there will be no more sleeping alone for a while, yay!

Have a great evening!

Fitness Goals

Hi! I am back again! Today I will talk to you about my new fitness goals. So here we go:

GOALS:

I want to participate in a 5k on September 12th. My goal is to run the thing (way) under 30 min, finally. My other goal is to have as much summer fun as possible!

HOW:

Speed training
Do interval and speed training to get faster, a couple of times a week. I was doing a 5k-10k program, but only running the sprintinterval lessons. But I think those are too intense for me. I am going to stick with a shorter version and include ‘long’ runs.

Get those abs back
Do short core workouts after runs. Not being able to follow classes at the gym for several months left me with no abs at all. I will also be doing ab exercises in most of my gym classes.

Summer fun
It is summer and I want to have fun, so I want to be active most days. I’d like to go outside more, but also just do a lot of different things. This means that I can’t exhaust myself with endurance training too much because it makes me need too many rest days. Another reason I don’t do this, is because I don’t want to strain myself too much because of my injury and my previous exercise burn-out. I will be alternating intense with less intense workouts. I will also mix things up. I have to because I cannot attend my regular classes, so I am just going to make the best out of it.

Relax, take it easy
Listen to my body and adapt workouts. Especially when it comes to my shoulders, but also if I am just tired and sometimes or if it is just too hot. It’s been hot here for a few weeks now. I look like this after every workout:

 

I am not sure if you can tell, but that is a lot of sweat!

So I only run in early mornings and I take walking breaks when needed. My heart rate really goes up with this heat and I struggle a lot, so I am not going to force myself.
After summer I will probably get crazy busy as I am setting in for my final sprint towards the end of my PhD. I am using this summer to catch up as much as I can, so there will be only the stuff left that I cannot work on yet. I am also using this summer to lower my stress level as much as I can. I want to incorporate yoga and meditation in my routine, so one of the classes I will be attending is Body Balance, a class with a mix of tai chi, yoga and pilates. I may also do yoga at home, like I did in my Daisy Do Zen challenge if I don’t feel like an hour long class.

That’s it, I think. Check my Exercise Log – the link is in the side bar – for my schedule and to find out what I have actually done. I change my schedule quite a lot, depending on how I feel and if things come up (I do like my social life).

Ok, I’m off. Finishing my tea while I try to figure out how to get Live Writer to understand that I have a new blog look. Then I have to finish some more work.

‘Till next time!

Listen to your body

Good afternoon everyone! I realized that I haven’t  told you about my new fitness goals yet. But first something about goals in general.

I was thinking about how I handled my bike ride the other day. And there are two things about it. On one side I feel like I bailed out when the going got tough, but on the other side I don’t mind at all. I know I didn’t train enough to do well. I am still happy with my choice to make things a little easier, even though I didn’t feel so bad when I finished, nor did I have a lot of sore muscles the day after. Those facts made a little voice inside me whisper ‘You see, you have some left, so you could have done the entire thing anyway, but you FAILED”.

But I refuse to listen to that voice. Because I remember that my problem was in the hills: Because I took it easy I was able to cycle 50k more, but every hill was excruciating. And who said that I needed to spend every single bit of energy in my body during that race anyway?

Spending a night like this is good…:

But not when you have to because you cannot move…

I am sure that if I would have pushed myself over that limit, I would be injured or at least it would have take a lot of time to recuperate from that trip. And I don’t want either of them. Exercise is supposed to be fun and should not leave you feel like you got run over by a bus for a week. To add to this: I went to a Body Combat class over 48 hours later. I was feeling great so why not ? I felt good until at some point one of the songs had us use much force on one leg for a longer time. And then my leg said ‘I am not doing this, you do it yourself’ and I got muscle cramps and had to leave class early. My legs were ‘not ok’ for the rest of the week.

So, I think I finally did well listening to the signals of my body (at least during the bike ride). It is so hard to know the difference between having a hard time physically but especially mentally and really getting to your limits.

I had to learn the hard way, of course, to listen. About a year ago I started exercising more frequently when I started to run and reading health blogs. I felt great about it! I realized pretty soon that once I started working out 5 times a week, I wasn’t able to do 2 hour workouts at the gym anymore. I used to combine Body Pump and Zumba for example. So I stopped doing that, but still pushed myself hard on most of my exercise days. Around January I got my shoulders injured and to tell the truth: I am still dealing with that. But around that time I also lost my mojo. I was not enjoying exercise anymore and I felt like I was getting worse and worse at it: my running slowed down, my heart rate got up and I felt totally blah. Luckily my injury forced me to cut down on exercise and I also recognized that this was not going well. When looking back, I think I may have come dangerously close to overtraining.

So I cut myself some slack and since about a month I feel better: I am still looking for my perfect balance but I am enjoying my workouts again, looking forward to the next one and feeling much better in general. However, now my shoulders are starting to hurt a lot again. BOO. It hurts most when I am at my desk for a long time. But I also think it is a bit too much of a coincidence that it came back just as I started to attend Body Combat class in full force again. I do not have insurance for anymore physical therapy this year so I am going to try to fix myself. Deducing from what my physical therapist told me and the exercises he gave me, combined with some old-faithful Google I am pretty positive that it’s my rotation cuffs. So, I am forced to adapt my routines again before I even got used to them. But hey, it’s a good opportunity to mix things up over the summer.

Phew…that was long! But  am done blabbing now. Stay tuned for my next post about my new goals.