Decadethlon – Lesssons Learned: Underperforming vs. Overtraining, The Ultimate Orange Crush, and How Chocolate, Fashion Magazines and TV Contribute to a Healthy Workout Schedule

So what are some of the lessons learned from over a decade of tracking workouts?

Underperforming (ie- relaxing on the couch, napping, breathing deeply with your eyes closed dreaming about your next piece of chocolate or other vice) is actually healthy. Instead of depriving oneself of these things, reward yourself with rest, you work hard, so rest hard and with resolve. Relaxing without guilt is something I will probably never learn, but I do try.

Overtraining (ie- genus gymus ratus) can get you killed, or at least injured. Let me tell you a little story called “The Ultimate Orange Crush.” This past fall I was working intensely toward my Orange Belt in Tae Kwon Do as well as performing three routines (including one with a stick!) at a tournament in front of 250 people, judges and the whole nine yards. I did nothing but practice for this, kicking punching, twirling my stick and basically looking like a Mom Gone Mad on the playground with my wooden stick. I should have MIXED IT UP, like gone swimming, run on the treadmill, sat on the bike, taken naps instead of done the dishes and walking around the house in a sleep-deprived stupor. No, no, I just had my eye on the Orange prize. My arms were more toned than ever, I won bronze, silver and gold (gold for the stick routine!) and earned my Orange Belt. But my intensity brought on foot tendonitis, an old college injury back to haunt me. I had to stop walking. Walking! My injury was kept rife thanks to the holiday season and hours on my feet in the kitchen. I had to miss this year’s Triathlon. I was crushed. I still am. The tendonitis nags me. I still can’t wear heels, run or even use the bike. No yoga, even. (Luckily, some light pilates is okay.) Moral of the story: Mix it up. Mixing it up keeps you balanced and interested, like anything else in life. There is a fine line between chaos and civilization. Similarly, there is an ever-diminishing line as one ages between benefitting from an activity and doing harm to yourself. I will probably never really follow the Everything in Moderation rule, but I do try.

Working out is Hard Work! Getting to the gym or doing a workout is not always, in fact usually, is not easy to do. And in order to remain healthy in general, epsecially when you live in an urban environment, you have to eat well, sleep well, balance the rest of your life like work and family and the annoying admin that adulthood brings on, and overall be totally organized and emotionally stable. So basically, it’s impossible. But I’m not (always) a pessimist. You have to convince yourself it’s fun, and there are several strategies to achieve this:

Adding Chocolate, Fashion Magazines and TV to your Routine can greatly enhance your performance. How? By making it fun! Simple. Read your book, flip through fashion mags on the treadmill, get your TV or iPad fix on the recline-a-bike, absolutely listen to music that pumps up your jam. You’ll have fun and feel good after the workout. Double good! Then eat that piece (or in my case, pieces) of chocolate.

Eat! A friend of mine said, “It’s all about the calories,” and she may be right. Still, I’d recommend eating a balance (there’s that B word again) of protein, carbs and fat balanced diet (my favorite being almonds and chocolate), drinking liquids and “exersizing almost daily,” to quote my doctor. Don’t be afraid of food, but know what the right food is for you. And enjoy it! Food is truly a joy of life, and seems to take a lifetime to understand how much of it and what kinds one needs, but that’s part of the fun. You can get really technical with Body Mass Indices, etc. Lots of resources online can help with this. Or you can just make sure you balance every meal: protein for your muscles, fat to feel satiated and carbs because who doesn’t love carbs?!

Remember: Just Track it! Have I improved over a decade plus of working out? Well, maybe a little, but the point is more perhaps that I am working out at all, and keeping track of the workouts is helping me continue to do them. So, log your workouts! It’s satisfying to review the log, while you munch on that chocolate bar (with almonds, always!) Remember you need to convince yourself it’s fun. Set yourself goals. My goal is to keep the number of workouts to 20 days per month (or higher, but that’s getting over-zealous of me again), whatever those might consist of.

And do try some soccer, Tae Kwon Do, or ballet, something new you didn’t think you were good at or could even do. You might just find a new addiction, and some new friends along the way.

Now if I could only find a way to log my kids’ time spent on the iPad (new app idea?)…..

While this concludes the Decadethlon series, I thought I’d add another blog entry next time on Gear, because that makes it fun, too: a new pair of sneakers, some fun tracking gadget, or tummy-hugging yoga pants. And music, of course! So watch for those Links and Thinks in the next episode.

Decadethlon – Origins of the Decadethlon

In my last blog entry I introduced my habit of recording my workouts and how tracking can motivate you to keep tracking (ie – continue going to the gym, while eating chocolate, rather than just eating chocolate). Below is more about how I began the record keeping.

Let’s begin at the beginning, before the recording began: 1999, end of the millenium, when I received my first Franklin Covey planner while working at World Wildlife Fund, first in Washington, DC and later in Frankfurt, Germany. This was important because I graduated from my usual Garfield comics calendar to an actual planner, and began using it to schedule things and record my expenses. Here I might add that back then, as now, I manually recorded everything. I mean using a pencil. Remember those? My kids use an iPad, I don’t know how to turn one on. But that’s next year’s goal, I digress.

Last year, when the idea came to me to chart all my previous recorded workouts as far back as I could go, I noticed, flipping through a decade of calendar pages, to my dismay, that I had not begun recording my workouts until 2001. This is not to say that I had not been working out prior to 2001 – I’ve been jogging since the age of 8 (I began in those 70s Nike sneakers that now some Japanese consumers apparently would pay good money to have - too bad I don’t still have them. But I do have my t-shirt from a Bay to Breakers fun from 1981 which I never ran because I came down with bronchitis, still in new condition, not for sale), I’ve been swimming since the age of 5 (not without almost drowing first), and skiing since the age of 3 (wedged between my Dad’s skis on my own little wooden ones.)

So, the year 2000 – that January my boyfriend of 5 years and I had moved from a small cowtown outside (literally called “Stierstadt”) of Frankfurt to New York City, and had our suitcases stolen from our otherwise empty apartment on the first day we moved in. Our jetlagged cats slept through it all. (The Manhattan police officers came in and said in their finest Brooklyn accents, “What’d they do? Steal all ya fahnitcha?” At the time, it was not funny.) Serendipity, my boss’ generosity, and a previous internship got me a job at Scholastic in swanky Soho, and I enrolled in a “passport membership” at the then already omnipresent New York Sports Club one block away. In September, I ran my first Race for the Cure in Manhattan, and I actually still remember how out of shape I was, gasping for breath after the first mile, as women of every age bounded past me like gazelles in Reeboks. I consoled myself with chocolate afterwards. That fall I also bought myself a decent case to house my planner, which now served as my life notebook. I got to the gym to take classes with my cublicle-mates two or three times a week, as I remember.

By 2001, I had begun recording my workouts. It turns out, that in my decade of recording, this year ranks as the second lowest in number of days I worked out in one year. That year, I had two scar revisions on my abdomen from an appendix scar from five years prior, had lasik performed on my eyes by, in my opinion, the world’s best lasik sugeon and patentor, Dr. Robert Spector, got engaged, moved to DC out of Manhattan three days before 9/11 happened, became a Foreign Service MOS (Member of Household) the day before 9/11, heard a rumor on 9/11 that a bomb had gone off outside the State Department where my fiance was on his second day of work, while I was a mile from the Pentagon. As I watched  - on a television in a non-descript conference room, surrounded by people with almost no connection to NYC -  the second tower fall, I cried tears of grief and disbelief for the city and people we had just left behind. After the panic run to fill up the gas tank, buy extra water, tuna and toilet paper, the hours in front of the TV reliving the horror of 9/11, we returned weeks later to NYC to visit and tried to make sense of the tragedy, having lived across the street from the front door of the Armory in Midtown Manhattan, which had become the hub for reporting missing persons. But that’s another story. That fall we found out we were posted to Paris and began planning our wedding, to be held in four months’ time. So I got down to the cheerier business of florists, photographers and wedding cakes. Both the lasik and the scar revisions gave me good excuses not to work out, but the most effective exercize deterrent that year turned out to be wedding planning. Who has time for treadmills when there are wedding cake frostings to be sampled? Days Worked Out: 104 out of 365 or 28%. Best month: July. 17 out of 31 days, or 55%. Worst months: November and December: Null Set!

The table below proves that I have been able to convert some of my record-keeping from pencil to digital. It also shows the rise and fall of my 2^nd lowest year in terms of workouts. I guess having a job, a few surgeries, getting engaged, moving, and experiencing 9/11 from afar, had an overall impact on my gym attendance.

2001	Days worked out	Days in Month
January	12	31	39%
February	8	28	29%
March	14	31	45%
April	15	30	50%
May	15	31	48%
June	3	30	10%
July	17	31	55%
August	6	31	19%
September	4	30	13%
October	10	31	32%
November	0	30	0%
December	0	31	0%
Total	104	365	28%

Tune in next week for the next installment: The impact that becoming a Foreign Service Spouse, or EFM – “Eligible Family Member” in State Department parlance, moving to France, and breaking a wrist had on the frequency of my workouts.

Triathlete Slogs to Finish Line, Chocolate Clenched in Fist

This headline, for better or worse, has not yet made the news at our local paper. Today was the last day of the two-week long Ironman Triathlon, and like a true athlete, I did cross the proverbial triathlon finish line, even sailing past it by a few inches.

It actually took me less than the full two weeks allotted to finish (okay, I finished only hours before the deadline) the 112-mile bike-ride (okay, it was a recumbent, stationary bike and I got through my pile of fashion magazines, looking at the pretty pictures while clocking miles at a very low speed), the 2.4-mile swim (I admit, I did this over 7 different days, inconsecutively), and the 26.2-mile Marathon run (done over 8 different days, also inconsecutively). At the end of each day (if not in the middle or at the beginning), I also consumed squares of milk, dark and white chocolate, and recorded my consumption of these. (Those stats will be brought to you later…)

What I learned from this venture:

• You can do anything you set your mind to, as long as it involves chocolate.
• Never underestimate the power of a good fashion magazine to get you through the rough times.
• Never mix milk and dark chocolates when you are feeling guilty about the milk and are trying to “dilute” with dark, it’s such a letdown if all you really want is milk chocolate!
• Do mix chocolates of any sort with almonds, walnuts, bananas, yes or even honey, in order to dispel any guilt surrounding the consumption of chocolate.
• Don’t run unless you have good running shoes and a good bar of chocolate waiting for you at the end of the run.
• Don’t swim unless you are sure you have a bar of chocolate waiting for you at home.
• Don’t get on that bike unless you have brought Vogue, W, Elle or InStyle with you to the gym and have secured access to a bar of chocolate.
• Never try any athletic endeavor, unless you have a serious chocolate consumption plan in place.
• Also never try such an endeavor without the full support and consent of your spouse (who must also be eating chocolate with you as you go.)
• And lastly, never discuss these strategies with anyone who is a serious athlete or doesn’t like chocolate.

Okay, now I’ll tell you the real reason I did this, chocolate or not: I turned 40 during this triathlon, and I wanted to do it for myself (could I really do it?), as well as for three of the most important women in my life: my mom and her two sisters. I did it for their hearts, and mine.

As for the chocolate, it certainly helped me get to the “finish line.”

The stats are in: 12 squares of white, 33.5 squares of dark, and 56 squares of milk. No, make that 57, as I pop one more milk chocolate heart before the midnight finishing bell.

Chocathlon

I have signed up for a triathlon -- my first ever! Not just any triathlon, an Ironman, one of the roughest, toughest sport combos out there, besides the Tour de France and pregnancy.

This triathlon will be spread over two weeks, unlike “normal” triathlons which start and finish in the same day. Still, two weeks is not very long when you only have 12 hours’ worth of babysitting available during which to attempt participation. Actually, if you think about it, we all do triathlons over time. It might be over a year, but if you swim, bike and run, however intermittently, then you do triathlons!

It is less than two hours before the race begins and I still have not even opened my race packet to see how I am going to divide my swim/run/bike schedule over those 12 hours and some nighttime hours, when the kids are sleeping.

But in order to prepare for this and reduce my risk of injury due to overtraining – a problem most serious athletes like me often have – I came up with the following simple regimen, and I marvel at its simplicity:

1. Avoid the gym
2. Consume large quantities of chocolate

During this triathlon, I will be celebrating my 40^th birthday – yet another valid reason for the consumption of chocolate. I will allow only gifts involving chocolate. This extra consumption and the support of my friends should give me just the boost I need to clinch a victory.

“Triathlete Wins After a Chocolate-Only Diet!” This is the title I am sure will grace the headlines of our local newspaper, and it will, of course, be referring to me. I will go to the podium, take my medal, bow, and wave bars of chocolate with a gesture that indicates, “I owe it all to these guys right here – Milk, Dark and White!”