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 – What Goes Down Must Come Up

Preface: As I said before, I’m a pencil-and-paper kind of person, still, and, for me, figuring out how to import excel charts into the blogosphere and make them look right is like sculpting ice with a feather. Will work on this. Maybe a better feather?

After an all-time annual low in numbers of workouts in 2002, my track record, so to speak, improved by 2004 to workout rate of about two out of three days. In fact, to date, it has been my “most fit year” in number of days worked out, despite a move from Paris back to Washington, DC, and bunion surgery to both feet (that’s what commuting in dress shoes in the Paris metro will do to you!) Thanks to the foot surgery, I discovered the magic of pilates: you can be flat on your back and still get a workout in! I let the Tour de France and Lance Armstrong (obviously pre-drug admission) inspire me during the weeks after my surgery. With still sore feet, I moved with my husband to Moscow in September. US Embassy Moscow had a more extensive gym, indoor pool and indoor basketball court. Indoor is the key word here, as it seems most of the year it’s winter in Moscow. I made use of the indoor facilities and agreed (only once or twice) to run with my husband outside during good weather. Days Worked Out: 231 out of 366 (a leap year) or 63%. Best month: September, 29 out of 30 days, or a whopping 97%! And that only 6 weeks after bunion surgery. (When you can’t walk, then watching and mimicking pilates videos is pretty much all you can do besides eat all day, anyway.) Thank you, Pilates! Worst months: May and December, tying the score at 14 out of 31 days, or 45%. Not so bad.

The year 2005 saw 217 out of 365 days of workouts, my third best year in terms of days worked out, despite the fact that I spent most of that year pregnant.  Conclusion: Pregnancy is good for staying fit! I also worked, a lot. I billed myself out as a photographer, shooting portraits and events and hit the elliptical machine, good for no-impact workouts. A “Yoga for Pregnancy” video was my new best friend. I had my husband film me – the 45 extra pounds of protruding belly, double chin, and all - on the elliptical machine the December night before my scheduled c-section, so there’s proof! I was more in fear of the IV going into my hand than the c-section into my abdomen. The last few exhausting days of that year were spent learning how to nurse a wonderful, wrinkly, squawking chicken-legged newborn. Days Worked Out: 217 out of 365, or 59%. Best month: July, 26 out of 31 days, or 59%. Worst month: December. 6 out of 31 days, or 19%.

2006 was another once-in-three-or-four-days years. I even recorded five and seven workouts for the months of January and February, respectively, despite healing from the fresh c-section slice and going on virtually no sleep, while also entertaining loads of visiting friends and relatives who wanted to see the baby. At six weeks old our newborn flew with us to wintery Moscow, where we returned to a freezing apartment, all three of us wearing ski caps indoors.  Unbelievably, neither the nights of little sleep nor the whistling Moscow winds kept me from dragging myself to the gym every few days, in between breastfeedings and naps. Instead, a workout meant a bit of freedom and independence for me, both rare commodities for mothers with newborns. In the summer, we moved back to Washington, DC to take a 6-week fast-track Japanese course in preparation for our impending move to Tokyo. Now I juggled nursing with Japanese flash cards. My “45% days worked out” in July dropped to the 20% range for the rest of the year as we moved to Tokyo with our 8 month old and got used to our surroundings in this exotic and exciting East Asian city. Days Worked Out: 116 out of 365, or 32%. Best month: December, 18 out of 31 days, or 58%. Worst month: January, 5 out of 31 days, or 16%.

The year 2007 in Tokyo I recorded an annual average of 47% of days worked out (171 out of 365 days), which translates to about an average year for the decade, not great, not bad. I finished up nursing after the first half of the year, took up soccer in the summer and became resonably fit for a glorious but brief six months before becoming pregnant again. Best month: September. 19 out of 30 days, or 63%. Worst month: August, 9 out of 31 days, or 29%.

Next up: The Year’s Five-Second Stretch, no, I mean The Second Five-Year Stretch, and the decade’s table (if I can figure out how to do it!)

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.