Oh, Barbara....

With only 17 days left until the half marathon (gulp), I really had to get my head in the game today. I ran 6 miles at the track and although I was a little slow today, I felt good. I got talked into joining my friend later in the day at the gym for a hard core work out. She called it "Barbara" which I thought was strange, but I didn't ask.

Below was me at the gym tonight.......


Alright, so I thought it would be more enjoyable to post a picture of this hunky guy doing pull-ups instead of me (chubby and not near as strong). :) All four of us gals had to use the pull-up machine that "assists" you in the one exercise that I find freakish. Who can really pull their whole body weight up to a bar over and over again? A five year old maybe, but beyond that it is just creepy.

The pull-up was just one of four exercises that we did in a routine called "Barabara". When I asked, I learned that the creators of the famous CrossFit fitness program names many of their routines after ex girlfriends. "Barabara" was either in fabulous shape or she liked to torture people. I not confident of which one.

The workout:
1. Warm-up on the stair climber for 20 minutes (NOT to be confused with the stair stepper. The stair climber has stairs that move continuously and you either have to keep stepping or risk falling off the back. By minute 5 I was covered in sweat, but I managed to complete all 20).
2. 20 pull-ups
3. 30 push-ups (Most of us opted for "girly" push-ups on our knees)
4. 40 squats
5. 50 crunches
6. Repeat steps 2-5 FOUR times or until you feel like you want to vomit or faint.

Honestly, it went by quickly and despite the sweat pouring off my body I felt pretty good at the end. I was so proud that I kept up with three gals that are smaller than me and who weight lift more often than I do. Will I be able to walk tomorrow? Unlikely. That ok though....pain means progress!!!

Running my ass off...

Ok, ok, the ass hasn't actually fallen off yet, but that would be a welcome side effect of training for the Seattle Rock and Roll half marathon. Several weeks ago, when I hit "confirm" on the marathon website, I instantly feared and regretted my decision to run 13.1 miles. On purpose. In reality, the most miles I have ever completed at one time is barely 8 and I think I was probably 30 pounds skinnier then where I stand on the scale today. Sure, I completed a 10k in January in just over an hour and I definitely could have kept going, but we are talking about DOUBLE the distance. Yikes.

There isn't much I can do at this point. The entrance fee has been paid, the date is set and I'm NOT going to make a fool of myself by faking an injury or simply slacking off and pulling out of the race. Nope, that won't happen. My only option, therefore, is to run. My ass off. I accomplished 4 miles on Monday this week and then a little over 5 on Wednesday. I ran through a literal downpour of Seattle rain and an emotional one of just not feeling fit enough to keep going. I have acquired a dull ache in my left hip (I can honestly say I have never had a pain in my hip. Its an odd sensation) and my ankles and knees continue to be slightly sore either after a long run or simply a day at work on my feet. Fabulous.

As the weeks tick away and June 25th becomes a reality, I will contine to push myself physically and emotionally. I want to reach this goal for the weight loss, for the fundraising for the American Cancer Society and for the feeling I know will be waiting for me when I cross that finish line (whether I'm on my feet or crawling). This week? 8 miles is the goal. The status of my ass actually falling off? I will keep you posted. :)

My new hobby!

At the beginning of 2011, I made some New Year's "goals" which included a goal to find a new hobby. I have been doing some photography and I really love it, but recently I found something else that has sparked my interest as well. Gardening! When I lived in California in 2008, my lovely roommate had an amazing garden in the backyard, but I can honestly say it didn't grab my attention and I did nothing except water it a handful of times when she was out of town. Sure, I had other things on my mind like my divorce and how to pay the bills that were piling up, but even with that weight on my shoulders I'm surprised I never saw the beauty of the garden.

What's changed my mind? What was it that peaked my interest and has my heart all a flutter at the thought of putting my hands in the dirt? No doubt, it has everything to do with my dad. As we wait (not so patiently) for his appointment with a melanoma specialist at the University of Washington on March 1st and as we anticipate the next step in his treatment, there are few things we can do to fight or ward off the return of the cancer. What we can do, however, is think about, research and genuinely care about what we put in our bodies. High fructose corn syrup and preservatives have been banished from the house and words like "natural" and "fresh" are constantly in our vocabularies. And so, since spring is fast approaching, we decided to turn a patch of the two acres my parents own into a garden.



Here is a picture of the plot of land. The barn in the background used to house our horses, but with the animals no longer a part of our lives, this huge piece of land is barren and screaming for attention. My cousin and her family are going to be a part of this garden as well and together we will all be digging, tilling, planting and growing some delicious food. ALL natural of course and planted with love. :)

So far on the list is kale, spinach, garlic, onions, squash, beets, carrots, green beans and maybe potatoes. With a Seattle climate, there are some things that just won't grow and prosper, but we do plan on doing some tomatoes in pots. Oh, and the big endeavor (if time and money allows) will be blueberries! If you have ever purchased fresh local blueberries in the Northwest, you know how lucrative growing them yourself to consume and sell could be.

http://seattletilth.org/

Seattle Tilth offers some great classes and learning opportunities and I'm thinking of attending a session. I hope to post more pictures later in spring of our garden in bloom. I will take great pride in producing food that is safe, healthy and sustainable as well as sharing this hobby with a very special and brave man.

Really bad excuses.

Alright, so maybe the cartoon above doesn't quite reflect my current situation of trying to lose a little extra weight, but I thought it was funny. I highly doubt that if I fail at losing some pounds that I will wind up dead in the near future. I'm not obese and am actually quite healthy as far as cholesterol and blood pressure numbers go, but at the end of the day I REALLY want to, and probably should, lose weight.

Several road blocks stand in my way of truly getting back into my skinny jeans, but the one that I find extremely troublesome this week is my ability to make excuses. Bad excuses and in some cases irrational excuses, but excuses non the less. I excel at making excuses and if making them were some kind of a sport I would no doubt be sponsored by Nike. I decided writing about them and putting it "out there" might help me to stay accountable so here it goes.....

I worked the lunch shift at work today and knew for a fact that I would be done at 3:30 on the dot when a co-worker came to relieve me. I had plans (since last night honestly) to hurry home, lace up my shoes and hit the pavement for a run around my block which tops out at 3.52 miles. I talked about it at work, had a protein packed and healthy lunch, and was indeed in my car by 3:35 heading home.

A few things happened between work and home, which IS quite a long commute (oops, is that another excuse?!) and by the time I pulled into the driveway I knew in my gut that running was the last thing I would be doing this afternoon. What happened on the ride home? Nothing more than some clouds rolling in and my knee having a twinge (SMALL twinge) of pain after a work shift on my feet. From these two things I derived the following excuses for not going for a run and I, sadly, can discredit and rationalize the reasons why all of them are really bad excuses.

1. It might start raining so I better not go running: this makes ABSOLUTELY no sense at all!!! I live, and have lived my whole life, in Seattle! I can get anything done in the rain and I actually really enjoy running in the rain. It sounded like an excuse someone from CA would use because, frankly, sometimes the world stops turning when it rains down there. :)

2. It might be dark by the time I get home, which wouldn't be safe: Ok, ok, a valid excuse for when I used to live downtown, but I reside in the suburbs now and I'm pretty sure I would be alright on a lit, busy street. Oh, and it doesn't get dark at 4pm any longer.

3. I really need to sit down and send out some resumes and work on my job search: This one is my favorite because there is nothing I hate more than job hunting and this can and is usually done at night from the comfort of my bed on my laptop. There was no need to embark on this task midday.

4. I have Wednesday off from work so I can work out and run even further without time constraints: Ah, yes, put off what you can do today and just wait to do it later. How about you run today AND on Wednesday.

5. And as I was arriving home the last and final excuse was that my ipod was dead: apparently I forgot that all I have to do is plug the thing into my computer for a few minutes and BAM, I will have music to run to. :)

Did I wise up and go for that run? No. Am I beating myself up over it? Not as much as I was earlier in the evening. I recognized the error of my ways and I will just start fresh again tomorrow. After all, we can't get it right every day and this journey is all about being forgiving towards yourself, right?

Conscious Eating

Earlier this week, The Oprah Show featured an episode where over 300 of Oprah's employees (including herself) went vegan for a whole week. As my quest for a healthy lifestyle and a nourishing diet is always in progress, I was excited to see the show and learn even more about this "non-animal" cuisine I've been delving into lately. Oprah's guests included notable author of best sellers including "The Omnivore's Dilemna" and "In Defense of Food", Michael Pollan as well as the newly coined "The Veganist", Kathy Freston who is the author of several cookbooks and a devote vegan herself. Oh, and she is slightly annoying and much too thin. :)

Oprah herself makes a point from the moment the camera started rolling that the show was, in no means, an anti-meat show (mostly out of fear of being sued again by the beef industry). Instead, it was a show dedicated to encouraging people to be "conscious eaters", a phrase that we are hearing more of in this country and especially in the beautiful Northwest where I live. What does "conscious eating" mean? Basically, it means knowing where your food comes from, how it is grown/raised, how it is brought to your table and what consequences it brings to our health, living things and our Earth. Pretty simple, right? Wrong.

I can honestly say that until about four or five years ago, I never once thought about where my food came from. I ate what was put in front of me or what I thought tasted good, but I never bothered to let my mind wander further than that. I became vegetarian for most of high school and college, but even then I didn't really care what produce I ate and I never once thought about the consequences of eating packaged food. A few years after college I started to pay attention to what I was buying in grocery stores and I became one of those people who thought buying "free range" chicken would somehow seal my spot in Heaven. My vegetarian status changed with the seasons and my love for animals kept me firmly ignorant about where the flank steak I was throwing on my BBQ really originated. Subconsciously, I don't think I wanted to know.

In reality, where our food comes from and how it is raised/grown effects everything in our modern world. Our health, our planet, our economy and the creatures of the world. I won't spout out statistics or include diagrams because frankly you can find all the information you want from books, the web and from simply people around you. Plus, I think deep down most of us know intuitively that its probably not good to eat things that can be microwaved in 60 seconds after adding water, most likely animals we are eating don't have the best life and fresh produce probably shouldn't have toxins and hormones in them. Common sense.

What I liked so much about the show was everyone, besides Kathy (who was wearing an amazing pair of leather boots....made out of ???) made a point to say that eating animal products is a personal choice. However, everyone should see and know the backgroud of where their food comes from and if they are still ok with eating those ingredients, more power to them. It, ironically, wasn't the filming inside the slaughter house that got to me. I grew up with my dad hunting elk and deer and I don't have a HUGE issue with the killing of animals to feed another. I don't want to see it or pull the triger myself, but I can understand parts of the practice. What got to me most was the fact that the cows and chickens live horrible lives, eat unnatural food for their bodies and endure a less than pleasant death. Nothing about it showed respect to the species.

So where do you draw the line and what is truly the best for your body and for our world? I'm not sure, but the restaurant where I work right now is a "farm to table" restaurant (another commonly used term these days) and I am starting to think that this movement is what I want to put my beliefs behind. Farm to table means that ingredients literally come from the farm to the table, or in our case, from the farm to our kitchen where we prepare the food and serve our customers. No toxins, no hormones, no disgusting conditions for our cows or our tomatoes and little to no impact on the environment because our ingredients are coming from local farmers. What a concept.

I've been trying to eat this way for the last few months with many days of cheating here and there because frankly it takes some planning and some hard work. After the Oprah show, I have been "vegan" for three days and I feel great, my "muffin top" is smaller (what a horrible term!!) and I feel like I'm nourishing my body from the inside out. So I challenge you.....find a local farmer's market, buy local, buy grass fed and natural meat if you choose to eat meat and eat what comes out of the ground and not out of a box.

My thoughts on beautiful leather boots? Undecided. :)

There but for the grace of God go I. Or maybe not??

Growing up, I heard the words "there but for the grace of God go I" often. It was one of the things my mom always said after watching a particularly horrible news cast depicting gang violence in the inner city, the treatment of women in cultures and religions so foreign to us and images of famine and genocide in third world countries. "Count your blessings you were born where and who you were" usually followed and to this day I am honestly and whole heartily thankful that I was born to a loving family, in an affluent neighborhood, in a country where basic freedoms are given to everyone and opportunities are limitless. I was truly blessed to be placed on the planet where and when I was. Or was I??

When something like cancer hits close to home, actually in your home, so many questions start to wear on your mind. Why my family? What next? What's the best course of treatment? After these initial questions, I began to think about cancer on a bigger scale. How does it start? How can we prevent it? What really causes it? All this wondering made my fingers do some typing on the internet and I started to look into cancer rates around the world. What I found was shocking. While depending on what cancer we are talking about, the U.S. is not always first on the list, but this country on a whole appears to be infected with cancer. The stats are alarming and shocking when you compare cancer incident and mortality rates with other countries around the world. What is equally, if not more, shocking is the correlation between industrialized, technologically advanced nations and cancer rates. The more money, power, education and innovation a country yields, the higher the probability that the citizens living there will be one day be taking a big dose of chemo.

Of course, we all know why. Nations like our own are all about convenience, technology, money and power. On a global and political scale this means far more than I care to delve into; after all this is a blog about health, fitness and cancer. :) But on a cancer related scale, it means that our surroundings are slowly poisoning and killing us. Our "food" is not "food" any longer, our air isn't clean and chemicals are constantly seeping into our lives from around every corner.

My dad doesn't eat fast food and isn't struggling with a pack a day habit. In fact, he is pretty darn healthy (was healthy?) with low blood pressure, low cholesterol and strong bones and muscles. He is active, smart and a non-drug user or alcoholic. However, just like all the members of our society, he is walking this earth and breathing the air above his head. He probably enjoys some take out pizza now and then and drinks a soda a few times a year. He has a cell phone and a laptop (similar to the one that I'm typing on right now which might be killing me) and uses bathroom cleaner when doing chores and wears regular toxic deodorant. He flies in planes, works long hours some weeks and didn't really know what high fructose corn syrup was until a couple of years ago. In short, he doesn't put himself at risk knowingly and leads a pretty healthy life, which doesn't seem to be enough.

In the U.S., our life expectancy is longer than most countries, however our cancer and obesity rates are through the roof. So, we are living long lives, but the lives are filled with illness. It is almost like the very same technology that can make a packaged meal last in our cupboards for years is the one that is offering our dying loved ones cutting age cancer treatment. We have invented the monster, but we also know how to fix it!

Do I want to trade my life for the life of someone in a village in Africa (one of the areas with the lowest rate of cancer) dealing with starvation, violence and death? Probably not. That is not my point. My point is as a nation we have so much to look at in order to better our lives. This entry is simply a "rant" and mostly stems from frustration and confusion. That is what blogging is all about, right? :) My plan of action......rid at least the fridge of dangerous things and then move out from there. Do I think we are all going to give up our cell phones and never use Windex or eat pizza? Nah. Or maybe so....