Use It and Lose It - My Fitness Goals for 2016

I have my Altra shoes. I have equipment. Hell, I have a whole home gym with a treadmill, an elliptical, weights, access to Daily Burn and DDP Yoga and god knows whatever online workouts

that are available; so to not exercise would be lazy.

Plus, I have a lifestyle I want to live. I don't want to drink water, eat lettuce, and call it a day. I want to eat fancy and healthy. I enjoy my wine and occasional martini. I like to watch TV, see movies, and play video games.

Also, as a best selling author, I spend a lot of time on my ass writing, researching, and editing my work.

So I have to exercise, if nothing more than to keep the continental drift of my gut at bay.

 

 

How many of you reading this have exercise equipment in a room, a closet or in your garage that you haven't touched. I'm actually laughing out loud as I type this because I used to be you too and ballooned up to 270 pounds. The ability to exercise was at my fingertips but I ignored it, just as I ignored long glances in the mirror that could have told me what I already knew. Plus, pictured don't lie.

Then came Afghanistan.

Then came a 60 pound weight loss.

And this is me at 215 Pounds

This is me at 270 pounds

And I'm back now.  Or mostly. I've gained ten of the sixty pounds that I'd lost back. That's ten pounds  in twenty six months, mostly the result of not exercising due to injuries. But now I'm hale and healthy. My legs and feet feel great. So it's time to kick it up a notch.

Goal 1: 9.5 minute mile. I ran a 15 minute mile in 2014. By the end of 2015 I'm at a 12 minute mile. I can do this.

Goal 2: Sirsisana-- headstand yoga pose. I want to do this.

Goal 3: Lose 20 pounds.

And how am I going to do it? The trick is to exercise every day. 

EVERY DAY!!!

"But I don't have time, Drill Sergeant Ochse."

No time, then TABATA! What is that? It's a four minute workout. Check it out here. 

"But I'm traveling and don't have anything with me," you cry pathetically.

We'll just forget that pretty much every hotel that isn't Motel 6 has a workout room. If you're traveling, then TABATA. Or get your wifi cranking and go to Youtube and type in yoga or hotel room exercises. You'll be surprised at the shit ton of free workouts that all you have to do is follow. Now your laptop or tablet or phone is a piece of exercise equipment.

The trick is to do something. By doing something-- anything -- what it does is give a destination for your food. Instead of going to fat, it goes to repairing torn muscles and fibers or building new muscles and fibers. The trick is everything in moderation and switch it up.

"Wait! That's like three tricks you've mentioned," you snivel.

Yeah?  So? Thank you Captain Obvious, now stop quibbling and do what I said -- Use it and Lose it.

What are your goals for the year? How are you going to make sure it happens? Do you have a tracking mechanism? Do you have an online support group? I'm curious to know.

Please note that I am an Altra Running Affiliate. The shoes below are ones I own and use all the time. From the Instincts I use indoors on the treadmill, to the Lone Peaks I use for hiking and trail running, to the Olympus which I use for street running, I use all of these. I wouldn't be pimping them if I didn't. If your arches hurt and if shoes feel too tight for you, these shoes are the ones for you.

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Kayla Montgomery Inspires Me to Run

my legs... my legs... where'd they go... help me... help me... 

I enjoy running... words I never would have said pre-2013 when I began running again thanks to new motivation and the right shoes (Altras). I enjoy running, recording my progress on my Suunto watch so I can review it later, and the feeling of accomplishment I feel afterwards. I enjoy running races. I enjoy running trails. I enjoy running new cities. But as much as I enjoy running, with the aches and pains of my fifty year old body-- the body of a combat veteran with significant VA disabilities --I still find excuses not to run.

Oh my back.

Oh my legs.

I just don't have enough time.

I'm just too busy.

The locker room at the gym is too crowded.

Whatevs. (insert eye roll here)

We know what those are. 

They're excuses.

Let me back it up a little bit. Do you know what a maximum effective range is? Its a military term which refers to the maximum range at which a weapon is effective. For instance, I think a grenade has a maximum effective range of 45 meters. The old M16 had a maximum range of 3600 meters, if I remember correctly, but it's maximum effective range was only 550 meters. That means the only realistic chance of hitting something is within that 550 meter span.

Now that you understand that, let me fast forward back to where I was. I'd just talked about all the excuses I make for myself not to run. Excuses. I had a drill sergeant who once asked me what the maximum effective range of an excuse was. I remember staring at him in fear, his brown round hat shadowing his deep set eyes as he leaned forward, ready to rip my throat out at the slightest sign of non-conformity. I replied with silence which was probably what he expected. Then he turned to the entire platoon and bellowed, "The maximum effective range of an excuse is zero point zero meters." And we all instantly understood what he meant.

please help me... help me... please help me...

I'd forgotten about that until last night when I watched the video about Kayla Montgomery. She has MS-- multiple sclerosis. MS is devastating and causes nerve damage that disrupts communication between the brain and different parts of the body. For Kayla Montgomery it's her legs. Yet she's one of the best runners in the country.

Just watch the video.

 

If you haven't watched the video, stop reading and go back and watch the damn video.

If you've watched the video, no doubt you're looking for a Kleenex. Go ahead. I'll wait. And if you haven't, again, watch the damn video, fool! 

my legs... my legs... where'd they go... help me... help me...

Okay, now that you've watched the video (or you're being sneaky and not watching it and ignoring my plea), you can see where my drill sergeant is correct. She runs knowing that at the end she'll collapse. The hotter the muscles, the less control she has of them. Perhaps the most special moment for me was when we see her coach catching her, lifting her, and taking her into the field so she can recover, her legs not her own, her mind worried that they'll never come back.

Then of course there's the championship race where she falls down, everyone passes her, then she gets up and wins. Dear god that made me choke up.

Yeah. Kayla Montgomery. She's a bad ass girl.

So when I'm ignoring my drill sergeant and coming up with a pathetically transparent excuse not to run, I'm going to channel Kayla Montgomery. If she can run, then I should to.

The maximum effective range of any excuse not to follow her example is zero point zero meters.

So, what are you going to do next time you don't feel like running?

Snap -- I Tripped and Fell in My High Fructose Corn Syrup

Up front. High Fructose Corn Syrup 

(herein referred to as HFCS) is bad.

Period.

 

You shouldn't be eating it at all, but damned if it isn't hard not to. I thought I'd been doing fine, but when a friend of mine whom I'm cooking for let me know that he can't eat any HFCS-containing foods, I started checking my labels.

And damn!!

There goes my favorite BBQ sauce. Syonara Sweet Baby Ray, it was sweet while it lasted. (And it's not just Sweet Baby. Virtually all BBQ sauces have HFCS.) For the record I'm trying Ann's Organic BBQ Sauce. Here's a list of some other BBQ sauces put together by BBQ Sauce Reviews.

There are even some BBQ Sauces out there that claim online not to have HFCS. Like Bull's Eye who claims that their BBQ sauce does not contain HFCS. Just check out their website here. But if you go to the store and read the label, it's the first ingredient mentioned. Thank God companies still have to mention at least some ingredients.

So why the frufru about HFCS?

Doctor Mark Hyman explains it better than I ever could in his not so very subtle article titled 5 Reasons High Fructose Corn Syrup Will Kill You. (Notice he didn't say can but used the very definitive helping verb will)

Some basic biochemistry will help you understand this. Regular cane sugar (sucrose) is made of two-sugar molecules bound tightly together– glucose and fructose in equal amounts.The enzymes in your digestive tract must break down the sucrose into glucose and fructose, which are then absorbed into the body. HFCS also consists of glucose and fructose, not in a 50-50 ratio, but a 55-45 fructose to glucose ratio in an unbound form. Fructose is sweeter than glucose... Since there is there is no chemical bond between them, no digestion is required so they are more rapidly absorbed into your blood stream. Fructose goes right to the liver and triggers lipogenesis (the production of fats like triglycerides and cholesterol) this is why it is the major cause of liver damage in this country and causes a condition called “fatty liver” which affects 70 million people.The rapidly absorbed glucose triggers big spikes in insulin–our body’s major fat storage hormone. Both these features of HFCS lead to increased metabolic disturbances that drive increases in appetite, weight gain, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, and more.

 He goes on in the article to give many examples of how the corn industry has propagandized HFCS

claiming that it's the same chemically as cane sugar. He shows where the industry has created their own fake news websites and have targeted doctors with information, even going so far as to vaguely promise that there will be consequences if they don't stop saying HFCS is bad for the human body.

But if you don't trust a medical doctor, then why not trust the master drill sergeant of all body coaches, Jillian Michaels of The Big Fat Loser fame in her article MYTH: High-Fructose Corn Syrup Is No Worse for You Than Table Sugar.  

In a recent study at Princeton University, researchers found that rats with access to high-fructose corn syrup gained significantly more weight than those with access to water sweetened with table sugar — even when they consumed the same number of calories. A second study they conducted monitored their weight gain over a period of six months and found that the rats consuming HFCS showed abnormal weight gain, significant increases in circulating triglycerides (which prevent the hormone leptin from telling the brain you’re full), and significant fat around the belly. Many health organizations link the increased use of HFCS in foods to the increased obesity rates in this country. Though nothing has been proven 100 percent, many studies point to these negative effects from HFCS.

 Summarized- You get fatter from eating HFCS in the same quantity as regular sugar. 

Oh, and there's chemistry involved. There will be a test. 

A study done at the University of Pennsylvania found that fructose does not suppress the hunger-hormone ghrelin the way that glucose (table sugar does). Women who ate fructose instead of glucose had higher ghrelin levels throughout the day, overnight, and into the next day. To put it simply, these women felt like they were starving all day, thanks to the fructose. In addition to making ghrelin levels rise, HFCS somehow tricks the body into not releasing the hormones insulin and leptin (the hormones released when your body feels full).

So here's what all this means to me with the start of 2016. I'm going to go through my refrigerator and pantry (and our pantry annex) and get rid of everything with HFCS. It's going to be a lot of things. It's not going to be pretty. Then I'm going to concentrate when I shop and buy only those things HFCS free. I mean to do otherwise is kind of stupid, right?

I don't drink sodas or anything with artificial sweeteners (until they start artificially sweetening Chardonnay then I'm screwed), but I know I'm going to encounter this out in the wild (eating at restaurants). I just have to choose carefully and ask questions.

I promised there'd be a test, right? 

Okay. Here's the test. 

Do you want to continue eating HFCS and see how long you live? Or do you want to do away with it and see how long you live? My favorite BBQ sauce and ketchup isn't worth taking 5, 10, 15 years off my life. I can see you now on your final day. "I'm dying, but at least I continued eating X Brand BBQ Sauce."  

Yeah. 

Right. 

You're not fooling no one.

So seriously. 

WTF are you going to do?

Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness Sucks Big Rocks!

Me in Feb 2014 after a Run or Dye 5K

I can ride a bike twelve miles without issue.

I can knock off a 5K anytime I want.

I've been doing Yoga now for two years and am in the best shape I've been in for the last two decades.

So why in the hell did 25 squats cause me so much pain that I can't work out for 72 hours?

How in the world was I laid low by a simple stretch!

Sigh.

So here's what happened. I decided I'd try out the Daily Burn. For those who don't know about it, it's a monthly subscription streaming workout video service. I wasn't able to get through the first workout because of wifi issues, but that's for another blog. I was able to do the burpees (which I've done before) and the reverse dips (which I've done before) and the situps (which I've also done before. Those weren't the issues. It was the warm up that got me. They started out by doing 25 squat stretches. 25 fast squat stretches. I could barely keep up. Then the wifi went wonky and I threw an hour long temper tantrum about the quality of our router and whether or not we should nuke it. But as I said, that's a conversation for later.

Then the next morning I go to get up and KABLAMO! I'm hobbling. The muscles in the back of my legs feel like they've gone five rounds with Rocky Balboa. I figured I'd pulled something. I struggled into my clothes and went to work. I figured my legs would get better. By noon they were twice as bad. By the evening, I wanted to cry. 

I had to find out what was wrong so I went to the best source of information at my disposal in a desperate attempt to find out if I had scurvey, or Hanta Virus,or the Swine Flu. Google! Way back in my head I remembered seeing a Facebook meme about some sort of tape worm that wiggles through your muscles and I was like OH GOD PLEASE DON'T LET IT BE A NIGERIAN MUSCLE WORM!!!

Turns out it wasn't. It was DOMS or delayed onset muscle soreness. Here's a description from an article about weightlifting:

This is the classic delayed onset muscle soreness (DOMS), which tends to kick in from as soon as six to eight hours post-exercise, and peaks around the 48 hour mark, though there is much individual variation of this timeline. And while lower body soreness tends to be more inhibiting and memorable, the phenomenon certainly isn’t limited to the legs. 

Here's a PHDs take on DOMS if you want to get all scholarly on me.

DOMS. Son of a bitch!

Squats are certainly unfamiliar. I never do them. And part of me says that if it hurts, then stop. Don't do anymore squats. Many people go their whole lives happily--nay gleefully--without ever doing a squat stretch. So then why do I care? Why don't I just never do them and move on.

Because I want my whole body to be in shape. I thought that biking and running and hiking and yoga and the occasional martial arts session would put me there. But clearly the back of my quads is weaker than the rest of my body.

Squat Therapy: 4 Drills That Will Improve Your Squat

It's now almost 72 hours after I did those damn squat stretches.  My legs still hurt. On a scale of 1 - 10 I'd rank it a 5. 

It's supposed to be better tomorrow. 

Either way I'm doing yoga. 

Even if my legs fall off I'm going to do some yoga tomorrow. 

I'm craving exercise. 

I'm jonesing for an elevated heart rate.

And when I'm fully recovered, I'm going to start training my legs for squats and this bad ass chick is going to show me the way.

Whoops! What Did I do? Need to exercise Quick!!!

We took a mini-vacation to Jerome, Arizona the last four days in celebration of yet another of my mother's 21st Birthdays. We had an incredible time, especially our stay at the Surgeon's House Bed and Breakfast. You know you're having a great time when you're still there and trying to figure out when you can come back. Yeah, it's that sort of place.

One of the Brekkies we had at the B&B

I managed to exercise only once during the four days by doing some stretching and yoga exercises as I stared across a thirty mile view. It was stupendous. 

But alas, with all the food and lack of exercise and wine -- oh boy was there food and wine -- I gained four pounds. One for each day, I suppose. Good thing I wasn't there for a week.

But no regrets. This was a vacation. You're supposed to enjoy yourself.

I don't regret the 12 oz NY strip.

I don't regret the almost pound of shrimp I had for breakfast one day.

I don't regret the 1/3rd pound venison burger or the heaping French Fries.

I don't regret the copious amounts of wine I drank.

You know why? 

Because I'm allowed to cheat every now and then.

But you gained four freaking pounds? What are you going to do about it?

I'm not going to panic. I know my body and I know how to exercise. Here's what I'm going to do for the next week-

• Limit my carbs
• No beef
• Watch salt content
• Eat yogurt for breakfast and take probiotics
• Increase fresh veggies and fruit intake
• Drink lots of water
• Daily Exercise

I mean, Who Can Say No to a Venison Burger

The last one (Daily Exercise) means I have to do something every day. For me, something constitutes at least 400 calories burned during a session. I have a Suunto Ambit 2 watch, so it tracks it for me.

Today I did a spin class and some bench presses, burning 600 calories. Tomorrow I'll probably do a long yoga workout. If my legs aren't killing me, I might run and then do a short yoga workout.

It's all good.

No reason to panic. 

I bet that I'll be 4 pounds lighter by Friday.

Easy Peasy Japanesey!

My Day at Desolation Lake

I didn't have anything to do to day and I didn't want to do it sitting in a hotel room, so I decided to take a hike. I googled the best day hikes around Salt Lake City and did some research. The words Desolation Lake kept showing up. How could an author of all things dark not take a hike to Desolation Lake. What the perfect name.

So I got up this morning and took a short twenty minute drive from my hotel in the city to the trail head in the Wasatch Mountains. I like that it's so close. After a winding trip through forests and into the mountains, I arrived at the trail head. There was a sign about glacier movements. Desolation Lake was derived from a glacier.

Then I began the trek. The websites said it was a moderate hike and about 8 miles or 12.5 kilometers. It started out uphill. I'm not sure what I was thinking, but it kept being uphill for kilometer after kilometer. Holy damn but my legs and calves were smoking. My average heartbeat was 120 and I was breathing heavy. I tried to take pictures and look around, but for much of the ascent, I was watching the trail in front of me. 

I achieved the summit and the lake in 100 minutes, about twenty minutes ahead of schedule. Must have been my old Army DNA kicking in. I put my head down and my feet in front of me and took the hill.

Desolation Lake was beautiful. It had a glacial blue quality to it, but it also had a green tinge and a rust brown tinge. Not sure if these were from the reflections or what was in the water. I tried to capture it in several pictures. The lake itself is fed from snow melt and has no other source. 

And of course, I took a drink of the water in Desolation Lake. I mean how could I not?

The trip down was much easier, although six kilometers downhill was tough on my joints. I passed several other hikers and dodged some bikers who were descending at insane speeds (but looked like fun). I saw a chipmunk, some long red weasel who was too fast for me to take a picture of, and a dark blue Stellars Jay.

I also met a man from Alabama who'd never seen mountains this big, so he decided to hike them. Turns out that the trail head has an elevation of 7260 feet and the lake lies at 9760 feet. My watch told me that it was an ascent of  602 meters and a total descent of 780 meters. Uphill was murderous so I told him, "It's all uphill from here." He laughed with good humor.

One of the websites said this - "The 1900 ft elevation gain from the trailhead to the lake is not one of the more strenuous grades in the Wasatch, but there are some stretches that are downright nasty. (My hiking buddy commented "This is one steep Mother--I think he was talking about Mother Nature). On the whole, the trail varies between very steep to nice, easy stretches of flatness."

I totally agree about the downright nasty stretches, but as far as the easy stretches of flatness? What trail are they talking about?

I encountered a Van Gogh palette of wildflowers, aspens rising like white sentinels all along the trail, and towering mountains in every direction. I also saw snow. In fact, I stood in some snow. In June!

And add to that I burned 880 calories on the ascent and 1259 total.

So here are some pictures I thought I'd share. Enjoy!

MISSION COMPLETE!!!
3 hours 20 Minutes