Wordless Wednesday

That Was a Workout??

Skinny

 So I went for a pre-breakfast walk, run, walk, dry-heave workout outside on Thursday prior to some nasty storms coming in. It was terrible. Or rather, I was terrible. Supposedly everyone who wants to cut weight before a race runs first thing in the morning on an empty stomach in order to maximize the fat-burning effects of the workout. They claim that first thing in the morning your body has no fuel to burn, so it has no choice except to burn fat. That is, unless your body is messed up like mine and then it may burn muscle instead.


No fat, no muscle

 So I got up and went out to give this a try. Keep in mind that I am not a morning person by any stretch of the imagination and I hate, hate, HATE running early in the morning, especially on a totally empty stomach. Now add to that the fact that I am having to walk a great deal prior to breaking into a run in order to get my knee warmed up enough to let me run at all and you have half a workout wasted just for the knee warm-up part.


Electric blue and speed walking

 I went out in my awesome electric blue running shoes. They're obnoxious and they'll blind you if you look directly at them for too long. I walked as fast as possible until, to be honest, I couldn't stand to walk anymore. My knee didn't technically indicate being ready to run. But I started running anyway. Oh, and my allergies were attacking me like mad. This was the first outdoor run I've done in a long time. Right off the bat I had to run up a steep hill. My knee complained the entire time, so I walked down the other side, which was steeper. Then I went back to running. I quickly became aware of the fact that my run pace wasn't much faster than my walk pace and I probably looked like an idiot.

Then I passed a snake.



You sure run slow. Why aren't you faster? Maybe I'll chase you.

 It was a tiny snake, curled up on the side of the road right at my feet as I sloooooowly ran by barely making any progress at all. At first I thought it was a piece of rope. Then I saw the head. Then it flicked its tongue and I said "oh, snake, how awesome." And I ran on, glancing behind me just in case the evil snake decided to chase me because, you know, they do that.

It didn't.

Here comes the sun

My run was terrible. I felt terrible. I had no energy at all and no speed. Also, I was badly sunburned last weekend and this was the first day I had gone out into the sunlight since then. I could feel the sun hitting my burned skin and it hurt.

Why so serious?

I ran to the bottom of more hills and trotted up the first hill. I thought about running on up the rest, but decided that I needed to make this an easy run, just to assure that I felt well enough to run again tomorrow. So I stopped and turned around, heading back the way I came.

Snake! Again.

Back to the first hill I climbed, and this is the steeper side. I stopped and walked the rest of the way home from there. And my God, I felt like death!

This is so much fun. I feel awesome.

 So, this running on an empty stomach thing, if it takes any weight off me and makes me lighter for race day, is hard. And if it doesn't take any weight off me, because lets face it, a personal trainer tried everything he could think of for a year and a half and it had NO EFFECT, then it's just a major pain in my ass. I hate it. I feel like death running with absolutely no fuel whatesoever inside of me.

And then for the rest of the day I felt like death. And I STILL hurt the next day, mostly from the sun on my burns, so much that I didn't run. Blah!

Next day, no run

Wordless Wednesday

Right Now

So, enough is enough. The company I have been working for is a body shop, a place infamous for bringing in tons of bodies, working them like slaves until they are exhausted, and then, when they slow down from fatigue or make a mistake (just a single one is enough), they throw them out again. It's a company with a well-deserved bad reputation and I will be moving on as fast as possible. I'm burned to a crisp. My mind and my body have had it. All around me I have listened to stressed out coworkers whispering about being called into their bosses offices to be screamed at for a mistake or not going fast enough or something, always something. This is a toxic environment. Having said that, I have worked with some great people. I think the problem in this place is high up, somewhere near the top, if not at the very top.

In anticipation of leaving I cancelled my brand new gym membership. I only joined because it is close to the office where I work. But if I don't plan to be working there anymore then I don't need a membership to a gym that probably won't be anywhere near my new job. Nashville keeps calling and calling. The city I'm currently in, oddly enough, does not. They don't seem to have anything going on. Its like a morgue here.

As for my workouts, I still have a race to prepare for. My last workout I needed to run, but I was going crazy from lack of weight lifting. So I did some chest and tricep exercises just to stop the atrophy that was causing me pain. Then I got on the treadmill and walked until my knee seemed ready to run. Then I ran like a mofo, faster and faster, dropping below the race-pace I plan to run for the Cotton Row Run and trying to hold it as long as I could. I didn't go the full distance because I had already done chest and triceps and have a limit on my time during lunch hour that I can exercise, shower and still get back to work. So I ran 2.1 miles as fast as I could. It wasn't fast by anyone else's standards, I'm sure, but it was faster than I have run my last few races and I felt good as I did it, which surprised me.

One thing I should mention, since I seem to tell EVERYTHING here, is that when I went to the doctor for blood tests, all I was asking about was my thyroid. But he tested other things and decided that my testosterone was too low. This would explain why my workouts seemed to have poor results, my race times keep getting slower and slower, and I keep getting injured. So my doctor put me on testosterone. Its nasty and it stinks and it makes me smell funky. But I sure am running faster all of a sudden. I'm not running at the pace I used to run, by any means, but I'm slowly moving back in the right direction, towards where I was before everything just seemed to fall apart. It makes me wonder if my testosterone levels just dropped off a cliff and this is why I am always injured and slowing down race after race. It might also explain why my naked body looks like a sack of potatoes with arms and legs instead of looking like me.

So, on top of giving me the teeniest dose of Synthroid for my thyroid problem, the doctor gave me the big T. Actually, he didn't give me the Synthroid. It was the nurse practitioner that I saw when I went back to talk about my test results at my own request. He put me on T, she put me on S.

Yes, yes, I know its annoying for me to shorten Testosterone to T and Synthroid to S, but all the stupid TV commercials are doing it and people aren't rioting in the streets about it, even though it drives most of us crazy. I figure I can do it for these two things since if you've read this far you surely know what I'm talking about. And also, I'm basically done talking about it now.

So Spring is officially here. I know this because my car is green today. Officially the car is blue. It says so on the title. But looking at it today there is no denying that it is currently green. Even the windows are green. It's so covered with pollen that you can only barely see the car beneath. And my sinuses are completely clogged with pollen. If I had a Nettie Pot I'd be trying to wash out my sinuses right this second to see if I could get some of this pollen out of there. Honestly, my nose is running like Niagara Falls and I have a trash can filled with used Kleenex sitting on front of me. I've gotten pretty good at balling it up and shooting it across the room into the trash can. It's my personal little allergy basketball game. I'm winning, by the way.

So, I'm leaving my job and potentially moving to Nashville, I'm taking testosterone and Synthroid, and my face is pouring snot out my nostrils. What other extremely personal and private information can I divulge on my very public blog against all wisdom? How about my steady plans to one day visit Australia? If I ever get to visit Australia, as I intend to do, I would like to meet up with the handful of Aussie bloggers who don't dislike me. You guys have been my friends for a long time, longer than this blog has existed, and I appreciate that. I want to see your fabulous country, get drunk in a pub, and throw pickles onto the ceiling in McDonald's, are "Maccas," like a proper Aussie.

So anyway, that's really all that's been going on. Lots of work, work, work, exercise, drugs, mucous, and emails. Pretty much catches you all up to this point. So what have you been up to lately?