Gear Up! Links and Thinks

Part of the fun (and the expense!) with sports is the gear. No matter the sport, there is the gear.

Let’s start with the basics: the Asics! Those are my favorite athletic shoes, but I’ve also used Saucony and the occasional Nike Cross Trainers (okay, that’s what they wre called 20 years ago). For walking around the house, I use Reebok Runtone (not Walktone, or whatever it’s called. Why walk when you can run?) I have wide feet, so Asics, Saucony and the Runtones fit the foot. They are supple, yet have support, and offer great cusioning for my achy joints and spine. 

As for socks, I like the colors and stripes of Addidas ankle socks, but Hanes cotton “foot” the bill just fine. They’re cheap and white. What more do you need? The cool thing I’ve discovered since pulling my calf muscle (wouldn’t you pull yours, too, at the age of 41, while running around with a bunch of preschoolers in Tae Kwon Do class?): Compression socks! Some say they work, some say they work because you think they work, but no matter, they do give support (and who over 40 couldn’t use a little support now and then?) There are several great brands: I’ve tried the German company CEP Women’s Running Compression Socks, the CW-X Compression Support Socks, and it’s footless brother, the CW-X Compression Calf Sleeve, which is great if you need to train in bare feet, i.e. Tae Kwon Do! I recommend wearing compression socks with long workout pants. Serious athleto-nerds, though, don’t care if they look goofy in knee socks and shorts. Just ask my pal Mateo, an Ironman, who originally lent me his CW-Xs to try. I told him he was very kind to lend me his socks, he told me I was very brave to use his socks.

In a true sign of love, Mateo bought his wife, Deanna, the FitBit, a device that can track your steps and calories burned and even tracks your sleep. Luckily, she likes and uses it! There is now an armband version called Flex, and both devices synch to your computer or cell phone and keep track of everything for you to keep you motivated and on top of your habits and activity levels.

A former high school field hockey and lacrosse teammate of mine who is now a coach to professional and Olympic athletes, including triathletes, Siri Lindley, with her company Team Sirius, uses the Halo Trainer, a device that grips onto a stability ball for stability and core strength building. She also uses TRX, a functional training device that helps you use your own body weight also to build strength, mobility and core strength.

And no triathlete can call her/himself a triathlete if (s)he does not consume GU! My fave is Vanilla Bean Gu Energy Gel (it’s like eating gooey caramel laced with caffeine). Siri uses Gu’s Chomps Energy Chews, new to me, a crunchy version of Gu’s amino acid and electrolyte-filled gels. Something else new I’ve discovered but haven’t tried yet are electrolyte tablets. GU has them and there’s another company called Nuun which has created electrolyte enhanced drinking tabs.

For the past couple of years, I had thought the most badass workout pants were the Lucy “Perfect Core” pants (which help you keep your core and its surrounding flabbage tucked in), but I have just purchased and tested Lucy’s “Perfect Booty,” and these are uplifting, shall we say! So now both are my favorites:   Decent athletic pants are also produced by Athleta, but after the “perfects” of Lucy, there’s no going back for me. Lululemon thinks it’s the top of the line in pants and acts like it, but I’m not so sure. However, I do use exclusively Lululemon sports bras these days. They are soft, flexible, fitted, fantastically formed and durable! Mine have withstood multiple washings in the yellow, gritty hard Moscow water system and they’re still rockin’! The other Lululemon item I adore is the “Forme Jacket.” Just as it’s name, it’s form-fitted, sleek and practical, sporting holes in the sleeves for your thumbs to keep the hands warm and the sleeves from riding up your arms (I just saw today that Gap has copied this feature and the look of this jacket in their GapFit line. Couldn’t think up your own style, huh? But actually, I do like GapFit's fitted shorts. I use them for coverage when my shorter skirts decide to have their Marilyn Monroe moments. Anyway, older models of Lululemon’s Forme Jacket also sported a hair elastic on the zipper just in case. Nice touch, bring it back!

My fave Pilates class? YouTube! Actually, it’s eFit30 Pilates from Down Under which you can view on YouTube! Yes! 30-minute workouts for free, and no commute! You can’t beat it.  My favorite instructor is Angela, who instructs out of Perth, Australia. She is experienced and totally ripped, and explains each movement and inhale/exhale in a clear, simple way. Their own website is http://www.efit30.com.au/ Beneath that baby blubber layer is that washboard stomach, I swear!

Heard of P90x? Me too, but I have never tried it. Supposedly it’s for the already fit to get fitter, takes 90 days and you can do it at home. It uses a mix of cardio, strength training, plyometrics (jump training), yoga, and stretching (according to Wikipedia). So you try it and tell me what it’s like! I’ll get to it eventually, I hope!

Last but not least, I would like to add that my gripes and groans about personal flab, injuries and shortcomings are there to keep things humorous and fun with a touch of self-effacement to counter any boasting about physical fitness (who, me?). Staying healthy is one of my goals in life, after past brushes with serious ill health and injuries. If one falls sick, it’s imperative to keep the dream alive of becoming fit once again. Check out Melanie Bowen’s blog entries on the importance of maintaining fitness through illness, in particular cancer. We always think of fitness for healthy people, but what about those undergoing chemo therapy or other potentially weakening and depressing therapies and illnesses? The answer is that fitness is for them, too! 

Again, keeping track of your workouts will motivate you to KEEP working out. Even though I only write mine down in pencil on paper, tracking my workouts has really helped motivate me, someone who can make up any excuse in the world in order to not have to go for a jog. I’m better about jogging now, though, than I was in my 20s, when I was super lazy. Now I’m old and achy and know it will just get worse if I sit on my Hintern.

Two more websites for reference:

American Council on Exercise: www.acefitenss.org

American College of Sports Medicine: www.acsm.org

This concludes the Decadethlon Series (for now!) At the very latest, I’ll check back in a decade to add my stats from another decade of workouts (I hope I’m so lucky!) Watch for my next MomVoyage blog entries on Food, Nutrition, Cooking and Travel! Hopefully these will be accompanied by photographs. So stay tuned and keep moving!

PS-I am just adding a few more links:
For some intense, short Abs workouts try efit30's 15-minute Abs Workout by a peppy Australian named Jess. For Body Sculpting Cardio workouts, look for efit30's dynamic duo, Tony and Fiona and their Total Body Workout series! Hello, sore muscles!
Another great pair of trainers, a married couple who have created their own website are Kelli and Daniel from FitnessBlender.com. Check out their large selection of free videos for Abs & Obliques (10 minutes!), HIIT Cardio & Abs (60 minutes of rigorous body weight work on day one and 24 hours of sore muscles on day two!), Natural Brazilian Buttock Lift, it's all there! (HIIT stands for High Intensity Interval Training.) All you need to do is turn on that Internet and get moving - right at home! This is great for Moms like me who are "stuck" in the house most of the day!

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.