ow...cont.

So my neck still hurts. It's a lot better, but it still hurts when I walk/run around...which I've ironically had to do a lot today. I locked myself out of my house about 45 minutes before work. "fine, ok, I'll just go." After getting a coffee, about 3/4 of the way to work, I realized that I did not have my food with me, so I thought, "Ok, I have enough time to get home, grab the thing, and get back to work if I really hustle, and I turned back towards my house to retrieve it. I did not realize until I was about 5 steps from the door that I did not have the keys to unlock it. So here I was with 15 minutes to work, and no food for the day. I hustled my butt to work, and hustled it to the supermarket in the 30 minute time I have to eat at work...all of this basically at a super fast walking pace. Sufficed to say, I am bushed. Especially cuz my neck hurt thru all of this, making it even less fun.

Anyway, now I gets to work out. Woo. Laters.

Somethin's up

Not 100% sure on the why, cuz there's a lot of factors, but I did something to my neck yesterday, and it's hurting like heck whenever I bend it in...most directions. This caused me to not sleep well last night, and concequently oversleep so I don't have time to jumprope and eat and still get to work on time. Gonna do jumprope when I get home, before I eat dinner. Hopefully by then my neck will be feeling better. Gonna see if I can take it easy today...something is obviously up with my upper back, and I'd prefer to not tweak a muscle. As of now, I'm the only one at work who has yet to do that, and I'd really like to keep that streak going.

Tonight is gonna be rough...gotta jumprope AND workout after work, which I don't usually do. Well, at least I have tomorrow off.

laters all. New pics will be up once I get the time.

plateau

So I've hit the plateau like a bug on a windshield. I feel like my whole body is heavier, and that everything is more difficult. I can complete the workouts, but I'm hitting failure on more than one exercise. Quite frankly, planks, pullups, and bicycles murder me. I'm REALLY hoping this passes soon, cuz it sucks.

Food wise, a-ok. Guacamole made, and it is delicious. I'm mostly just snarfing it with a spoon, but I used cucumber slices once, and it was awesome. I'm REALLY glad that we got the little bit of more food this week. Just one egg white and a bit of yogurt has made a massive difference in how hungry I feel throughout the day. Knowing now how my metabolism works, chances are I'm going to be hungry all the time again at the end of the week. Woo.

Just another 32 days to go. We can make it! Push thru team!

strange things and general dissmay

Ok....to start with, NEW PICS. Apparently I have more back than I deserve. Hells yeah to that.

Quick note...I can't wait until I get "before workout" and "after workout" snacks...cuz I'm STARVING thru my entire workout. I have to plan it out so I eat about a half hour to 45 minutes before I actually start so that I'm not too full, but have SOME food in there. Get on that, Patrick.

Now, down to the more meaty bits of what I wanna tell you, and the reason for the titling of this post.

Number 1: My indulgence was to go to a friends going away party. I had a slice of pizza, a bit of a cupcake, and a few drinks (not weak ones, either. This party was not the place fer mimosas.) To preface this, my brother was there, and a number of other people at least my size. I had as much as they did. Now, the weird part is that I didn't get drunk at all. I stayed sober thruout this party...but everyone else was shitfaced drunk, staggering and some of them falling down. It was a very odd experience, because I've always been a lightweight, and haven't actually had anything to drink in a LONG time. I do beleive that my body quite simply killed the alcohol. It was actually intensely disappointing, kinda like getting an ice cream for yer indulgence, and then discovering that it evaporates about 1/2 of an inch from yer tongue. Major disappointment. However, I wasn't hung over either.

Number 2: This is more of an uncertain dread thing. I may have scabies. Tiny mites that burrow under your skin, and live there, laying eggs and making homes INSIDE YOU! ugh. I don't have any of the signs yet, and I'm no more itchy than normal, but still. Just the thought that I may have it is enough to make me analyze every tiny bump on my skin and every little itch I feel so that they seem ENORMOUS and HORRIBLE. Ugh. At least it's easy to treat, if it turns out I do get it.

Anyway, those are the big things I have to report about. No fun fer me, it seems. Workouts/diet continue unabated. I'm not NEARLY as motivated to do anything as I used to be, and I REALLY want to sit down with some kind of junk food. Really...something like chips/salas, or quacamole. The truth is that if I really really wanted to, I could, but it'd take SO VERY MUCH work to make PcP acceptable chips/salsa...but it may be worth it. hmmmm.....

Also pullups suck.

That is all.

I'm bad at this.

So blogging. I suck at it. I seriously have no idea what to write. It's not that nothing is happening, or that I don't feel this that or the other thing that people usually feel on PcP. It's more that I tend towards privacy. If I don't talk about something within about 30 seconds of it actually happening, I don't care to tell anyone about it. This is true of conversation or blogging. Either way, I just don't really wanna write all that much these days. Which is probly because of the PcP.

I'm currently at a point where workouts are simply destroying my will to live and the diet feels like I'm being fenced in. It's not that either feels bad, or that they're too hard, it's just that I don't want to HAVE to do something any more. I feel as though if I had a little more freedom in the diet, I'd be able to keep up AND be happier. I realize this as being false, mostly cuz I don't really LIKE watching what I eat. I have a bad tendency of going for the quickest food. This being Burlington, it is a lot healthier than, say, mcdonalds, but it isn't exactly what I need now. And therein lies the problem. My desire to simply do what I want is in conflict with my intellect, which is saying "do what you should." Annoying.

anyway, other than that, not much to report. 60 second planks are officially made of poo. I fail mizerably at pullups. Can barely get thru 3 sets, let alone 4. Oh, and I couldn't jumprope that well this morning. woo woo the rest is boring. G'night.

1/2!

half way. HALF WAY!

I'd be jumping up and down but I only just finished my workout, so that'll be real hard.

Ok, I admit it. I'm officially getting sick of some stuff. Muscular soreness in the mornings are horrible. This is new, cuz I recently switched my workouts to the evenings, cuz waking up at 9 for me is similar to anyone else waking up at 4 am. So now I wake up achey and cranky and generally in a foul mood.

Top off waking up sore and add on being tired of simultaneously burning thru food AND being massively hungry. I'm kind of frustrated by all this, and the wonderfulness of not really having a social life, or much of a social outlet is getting me a little on edge. No big anger bursts, but I find myself having a harder time dealing with difficult social situations. Work, namely, where I have to talk to people who have a hard time keeping a single conversation in a single decade. When you have to generally start any conversation in the middle, it gets hard if yer already rather peeved at the world in general.

I blame planks. I quite literally was unable to complete them the first day they hit 50 seconds. My arms, legs, back, and stomach all gave way in a slow, unhaltable slide to prone. I didn't fall...I didn't give up, but my body quite literally was unable to hold itself up no matter how I pushed. Seriously tired of planks. Don't even wanna think about the higher times. ugh.

Anyway. Continue. Cuz there's nothing else to it but to do it.

musings continued

The musings continued, and reached and end. RESULTS!

Musings on a beard

So...I've been growing my beard since about a week before I starded PcP, and now I'm tempted shave it down... This is a connundrum now because I want to save it for haloween, but now that I've lost so much weight and look awsome, I want to show it off even more. And then to add to that...I have lost my shaver chord and no longer have the power to shave m'face. SHOCK AND DISMAY!

In more serious news, I recently switched up my workout time to after work. I gotta say, so much easier. I stay up later, but I wake up later too, so that works out, and I don't have to rush nearly as much in the mornings. Also a bonus because recently workouts have been turning my legs into tubes of jelly, and my arms into weak rubber bands. It feels great, but when I have to physically move things at work, it becomes a hassle. After work leaves me strong for most of the day when I need to be, and then I get to go home and work out, which the anticipation of doing has made it all the better. Plus I can take time and really concentrate on it better, which is good because as it gets harder I need to concentrate more to keep it actually working out the muscles.

Diet wise....doin' ok. I'm starting to feel what Haley was posting about, with just being sick of dealing with it all the time. It's like a constant nag in the back of my head "do I have enough food? Do I? DO I?" It can get pretty awful on the way home from work at 11 pm if yer not sure you have enough eggs. I stick to it, but I get sick of the time it takes. In fact now I must cut this blog a little short, because I have to go and buy more meat/veggies/fruit/etc. etc. etc.

laters

whew

Ok...so

since Thursday I've been at home for....a lot of stuff. A quick summary has me partying hard for the past 3 nights, and now I'm exhausted.

That needs some explanation.

I went home for my mother's birthday, where there was a rotating set of about 15-20 musicians who just took up instruments in our back yard, and got everyone dancing. The next day my aunt, uncle and cousin show up, and they always bring a party. The following day we all went together to the Barnard Street Dance, which is a big dance where my step dads band plays every year, and everyone dances their respective asses off. Good times.

Anyway, with that said, I'll now break down the pluses and minuses of this trip.

Positives first!
-Food. Everything was fresh. I do mean that. "want a cucumber? GO PICK IT! want some eggs? GO HUNT FOR THEM!" all that fun stuff. Delicious. Now see the overpowering, overflowing life of the garden of which I speak. From these pics you can see Dill, Blueberries, Corn, Lettuce, Tomatoes, Peppers, Green Beans, Carrots, Hops (yey beer) and other stuff I can't remember.


-Dancing. If anyone ever asks me about the most intense aerobic workout I can think of, it's dancing. And I must have put in about 6-10 hours of it over this weekend, and I don't mean just bopping a bit, I'm talkin' full swing blues rock dance band and just letting go. Woo. My whole body is sore in new and interesting ways.

-Seasonal stuff. Pictures are worth a thousand words.















SEE NOW THE GLORIOUSLY DELICIOUS AWSOMENESS OF MY FRUIT SNACKS! MUAHAHA!

ahem.

Ok.

There we have the biggest good PcP portions of this little trip. In addition to that, there is seeing a LOT of family, wonderfulness of weather/terrain, doing awesome fun stuff (mushroom picking!) and a generally terrific air to the entire time.

Now for the less good part, at lest from the PcP standpoint. Namely, the incredible cornucopia of awesome (but salted) food that was laid out before me from the point when I arrived until the moment I left. In the interest of transparency, I admit I partook of the food. I tried to be sparing (very hard to do) and succeeded a little. I didn't go for any of the obvious packaged dips, and aimed more for the home made items, and I really couldn't stop myself from having a glass of Apple Wine that an old friend makes. DEEEELicious. I felt bad about it afterward tho, in spite of the fact that I probably burned more calories than I ate from the dancing.

The only other time I cheated was to have a small glass of champagne and some (quite pricy) caviar that my aunt brought from New York as a sort of goodbye to the weekend. I was honestly not going to refuse an opportunity to eat something so rare and delicious. And, immediately following that we all went and hayed a field, thus probably burning 3 to 4 hundred times the actual calories that we had consumed.

The only REAL problem I had was with salt. Since nobody else was paying attention to this, I lacked my usual array of non-salt spices and interesting taste methods to get around wanting salt, and it was EVERYWHERE... I didn't use any tho. I stayed true. I found a small bottle of horseradish who's ingredients where 3 words long. "Horseradish (of course)." just a bit of that stuff got me thru some dry meals. I didn't realize how big a part of my diet salt was untill I made this trip back to the land I lived in.

Now, the biggest thing that I want to take away from this was people's reactions to seeing me. I got a HUGE number of complements on slimming down and muscling up. The BIGGEST thing tho was the dancing. Allow me to add a little backstory here fer full effect. This dance happens once every 3 years. In past years I have done the same thing I did this weekend, but with less dancing. I cut a rug occasionally, and really pushed myself at the actual dance, but needed breaks and slower songs. This time was different. I stepped up at every song and just shook my booty till there was no more music left. I was dancing at top capacity for about 3 hours a night for 3 nights in a row. Hell Yeah jump ropes giving me crazy ability to jump around like a maniac for a long time! I doubt I'll ever give those things up.

And that concludes my story of simultaneous shame and glory.
g'night.

Long Week

So, this week has felt like it lasted a month. I put in extra time at work, AND work was especially difficult over the past few days. To top this off, I've been in a workout slump, hitting failure earlier than I feel I should. Having real trouble getting my upper body to lift the rest of me. Ahh well, according to everything I hear, this means I'll get better soon. lookin' forward to that.

On the big plus side, I now have Ramiro (a co-worker) and Nathaly on PcP, and we all live within a block or two of each other. Can't wait to have people to swap PcP stories about, and possibly have a workout partner occasionally.

As a final, happy note, I bought a whole chicken at the farmers market on Saturday, and am now roasting it covered in onions. This should probably set me for a week or two, and I'm REALLY looking forward to that first meal...mmm.

anyway, laters all!

Pullups!

So, today was the first day using my new pullup bar, which is infinitely better than my old one, especially seeing as the old one could only be used for incline pullups. This does mean, however, that I had a MUCH more difficult time with them. Barely made it thru the first 2 sets, and definitely hit failure in the second 2.

In fact, that was the theme for my whole workout. Everything seems much harder today. I woke up sore, so that may have something to do with it, but there seems to be more to it than that. even my jumproping was bad. I could barely make it 50 jumps without tripping up. Overall, a frustrating workout, but I feel great now that it's over and all my muscles are twanging away.

Other than that...kinda boring on my front. Putting in some extra time at work, and just been tired. Blah blah blah, you know the rest. Talk to ya all later!