All Systems Go

Arright arright arright.
Yeah yeah yeah.
I haven't blogged in a week. OKAY. But guess why? Becaaaaause....I've been busy...training! I work out twice a day now! Yay! Ugh! Awesome!

Let's start again, with a *little* less vernacular.
I think, for all intents and purposes, its not wrong to say that this week has been my first full week of training. I only had one day I didn't work out, I had two team practices, and I now own - at least some version of - all the equipment I will need.
Quick run down of the week's workouts, should you be curious:

Saturday
Ran in San Francisco. This was supposed to be a 40 minute easy run, which became an hour and a half-long odyssey, punctuated by walking backwards (cross-training!) up hills that were just not happening. I got lost deep in Upper Noe Valley, and spent literally 45 minutes running into & back out of streets that turned out to be dead ends. Whatever happened to "No Outlet" signs, SF? "Not a Thru Street," Gavin Newsom? Hmm?? The extra fun in this was that it was mostly on a hill overlooking the street I wanted to be on, and could have been, if I'd just committed to a sharp, steep tumble.

Sunday
nothing! ha!

Monday
Oh wait, nothing again. I lied before when I said there was only one day off. The curious thing about this rest day was when my body started to hurt. Around noon, I got growing pains. They throbbed gently until I went to bed. Interesting?


Tuesday
Morning - Swim, 45 minutes. LA Fitness Radio has some shockingly bad tunes. It's really stunning. Glad when I swim I only hear it while I'm in the locker room.

Wednesday
Morning - Bike, 1 hour. At the stupid gym again, but I did the recumbent bike this time. I'm not sure if this "counts", but I had sweat on my face and no bruises on my butt, so I think it was the right choice.

Thursday
TEAM SWIM PRACTICE!!!!! I don't really think of myself as an athletic person, but I do consider myself an athletic childhood person; I was ECSTATIC, in my own way, to be in the pool with 40 other people, to be circular swimming (!!!) after years of feeling bad for chasing down grandmas and loquacious Russians at the Y, and to smell grass from the nearby soccer field on the walk from and to the car.
It stuns me, occasionally, to realize how busy I was as a kid - swim practice twice a day, soccer a couple times a week, ballet once or twice a week, piano lessons - and to see how "busy" I feel now, without being as diversely developed as that. Mike (Rizzi, my training buddy) and I have talked about this a few times, but especially on Thursday. I also asked my Mom recently whether having us in activities was partially done so that Mom & Dad could have a little extra work time without having us be abandoned, and she said that was about half of it, the personal development being the other half. Trick! Good parent trick!

Friday
Morning - Run, 40 minutes. Beautiful morning in the neighborhood. Got further up Echo Park Avenue than I've been before. My first workout that felt slightly taxed the entire time; consequently, my first workout where I started to realize I'm pretty proud of myself.

Evening - Swim, 45 minutes. Again, felt a bit tired, but loved it.

Saturday
TEAM RUN!!! The run was haaaaaaaard, I was tiiiiiiired, but it also felt gooooood. At the end, some of us did stem cel donor test kits - 4 cotton swabs in the inside of your cheeks, then S.W.A.K. - for a teammate's friend. They'll keep my results on file until I'm 60. This was something my uncle Randy and his donor, Uncle Boo, went through....what an organization Team in Training is. It's easy to forget.

OMG I bought a bike after practice! It deserves its own long, impassioned post!

Sunday
Swam, 45 minutes. Can feel myself improving, though far and away the best part of the workout was the warm down, when I just splashed around for awhile. Water! So strange! People can't float on land, you know? It's COOL.

I have a lot of thoughts surrounding all this working out - I'm HUNGRY all the time - but for now I think they are the beginnings of larger thoughts developing. The really remarkable thing is the improvement in my mood generally. I don't really know where I stand on the kinesiological-psychological connection - where what my body does plugs into what my brain does, and vice versa, and how much I think they are interdependent - but there is definitely some mental garbage being expunged through movement. That's most of what I'm thinking about right now, how much I'm thinking right now, and more at peace with it being my own quiet process, rather than running at the mouth as much as I am wont to.