Posts by Sara

Coming soon!!!

Posts by Tamsen

• Where Fashion Meets Fits - February 24, 2010
  
• The Mental Starting Point - February 15, 2010
  
• Sickness and Fitness - February 10, 2010
  
• Reality Hits the Mat With You - February 18, 2009
  
• Move It and/or Lose It - January 18, 2009
  
• The Wall and The Moment - January 5, 2010
  
• Blog Action Day - Poverty Awareness - October 15, 2008
  
• How to P90X When You're Not Sure You Can P90X - August 2, 2008
• The P90X Manifesto - April 28, 2008
  
• First Ever P90Xpert Contest - January 14, 2008
• The Rightness of the Right Tools - January 6, 2008
• New for P90X Lean: PlaChatQua - November 1, 2007
• P90X Lean and The Dreya Roll - October 23, 2007
• So Slacking - July 31, 2007
• Switch it Out - July 12, 2007
• P90X Food - July 5, 2007
• Where to Find P90X - July 5, 2007
• In Praise of Chest and Back - June 23, 2007
• p.p.s. - June 11, 2007
  
• p.s. - June 7, 2007
• P90X in Balance - June 7, 2007
• P90X: Lessons, Progress and The One Thing - May 27, 2007
• Mistake of Enthusiasm - May 18, 2007
• The SickFreak Thing - May 4, 2007
• Ups and Downs of Upper and Lower - May 3, 2007
• The X Files - April 26, 2007
• 80% of 90 is Showing Up - April 8, 2007
• Om-Ow-Om-Ow - March 25, 2007
• Failure, the P90X Way - March 19, 2007
• P90X - Week 1 in Review - March 9, 2007
• Sick to Fit - February 23, 2007
• Damn the box - February 8, 2007
  

*Cough Cough Cough*

I finally made my decision last week about my next 90: P90X Lean! I figured with the intensive running I'm doing, gearing up for the Portland Marathon on October 7th and the Nike Women's half a few weeks later, I should stick to a less intensive start. Plus, the Lean program seems to have more cardio that I can easily add or swap in my running for.

There it was - was happy with my decision, planning the best day to begin. Then I ran my 20 mile training run two sundays ago... It went pretty well, considering this was a jump up from 16 and the longest I'd run in a long time. Then I went to Oakland for a concert (Pink Martini... fabulous!!) and came home with a strange warmth in my chest, not brought on by the greatness of the show. A little bit of a wheeze, a tad of a dry hacking cough. Not good.

Sure my immune system was a bit low (I really need to start taking multi-vitamins and immune boosters after my really long runs). But I blame Oakland! Rumour has it a cough has been "going around" there, whereas all my SF friends have been cough free.

So I took a few days off, figuring it'd be best to take it easy with this, what with the marathon coming up so soon, and another 20 miler due this past sunday. But by sunday, the cough was not only still there, it was worse. And I'd been so good, too! Taking my expectorant regularly, drinking lots of liquids... So finally today, a week later, I called to make a doctor's appointment. And I haven't run, let alone started my P90X Lean at all. I feel terrible.

*cough cough*

Getting Back On Track

I've been gone for so long and completely lost my second 90 day set finale...
What can I say, despite my unwillingness to believe it, weddings really do swallow up your life. From the Sunday before our wedding (when the family members showed up) till two and a half weeks later when I got back from the wedding continuation trip (no honeymoon for us), all I did was two runs: one hard angry 30-min run on rehearsal day (can I just say I run harder and quieter when dealing with family wedding-related crazies?*) and one lovely sunny hour long run on the day of the wedding.

That's it. No strength and no cardio even once the initial wedding dust settled. OK, there was one night of regular dancing, one night of belly dancing lessons and a full night of obligatory belly dancing as part of my second wedding celebration. There was also some frisbee throwing in the sea and some recreational swimming. But that's it!

So now I'm back in town, ready to get back on track, feeling a bit heavier after 2 weeks of feasting and the lighter workout load. My main question is what do I do? For the rest of this week, I'll just ease my way back into working out with a run here and there and some visits with Maya (hopefully she'll be understanding). But then what? I dropped the ball on the Women's Health Magazine plan, but aside from the one week kick off, that workout plan didn't do much for me.

People who've noticed that I lost weight this past year keep attributing it to the fact that I was getting married, either as in "When I was a bride, I was so stressed I hardly ever ate!" or "Trying to get in shape for the wedding, eh?" Which is totally fine, if that's what my motivator was. But it wasn't. My motivation stemmed from a number of things, but primarily developing a good research foundation for the athletic cookbook I've been working on.

My goal for 2008 is to run 8 races (half marathon and up). And for that, I'd like to be in as good shape as I can be. So I will continue to ponder what my next workout plan will be...

So Slacking

sara ran the san francisco half on sunday. I. DID. NOT.

knees. 'nuf said.

this is my first run blow-off. can i just say that wandering haight street with a hot coffee spiked with bourbon just after 8:00 a.m. was delightfully wicked? too late for your approval, i just said it.

and in case you were wondering, this is completely and utterly in line with the P90X recovery week program that gleefully resides in a parallel universe.

Switch it Out

Two things crossed my path this week, both promoting the ever-increasing acknowledgement that Different is More: one was an article in the July 2007 issue of Harper's Bazaar about a one-month makeover; the other was a post to a blog my friend Stacie sent me about fat marathoners (see top left of this blogsite for the reason we started Ti90).

The article was by a writer who had taken an assignment from HB to do a month of training with one of Madonna's trainers, using an idea that's familiar to anyone bouncing around in the P90X world: be consistent, but switch it out. The writer's training called for a new routine every 10 sessions. By the end of the month she'd dropped four dress sizes and 10 lbs. (I'd like to hear about her in six months to see if she maintained.)

The blog post is by a fabulous fitness fanatic girl geek who calls herself Skwigg. She analyzes the paradox of running distances and gaining weight. She describes some of the theories that abound on the subject, but concludes with the one that got me here in the first place: muscles have memory; train them using only one method and they will plateau. (Her "If they'd just...throw up a lung for 20 minutes" comment is priceless, and right on point.)

Yeahbut.

These cosmic pings all happened during the same week I decided to mess with Phase Two of Doubles. Instead of three weeks of crazy upper body and pounding cardio, I'm doing four weeks so that my "rest" week falls immediately before the San Francisco Half Marathon. Yeah, it went through my mind: I'm defeating the purpose of the "muscle confusion" plan. But if I had stayed on track...well, here's the complicated algorithm: 6 solid days of lower body stress + 13.1 miles = Cranky Bitch at Finish Line.

Conclusion: Switch it out, but don't bitch it out.

P90X Food

Just before I started P90X, I wrote about what Sara just referred to, the EGGPOUNDER 4000 portion of the meal plan. Basically, the P90X program includes a food plan to ensure maximum results, and one approach offered is a weekly menu plan.

Aside from the enormous (for me) amount of food I would have eaten if I'd gone by the menu, I would also have gone broke. Here's a sample shopping list from the first two days of the program:

----------------------
Fat-free turkey, Extra lean ham, Salmon, Fat-free chicken broth, shrimp,
Cottage Cheese, fat-free mozarella, fat-free milk, string cheese, 8 eggs
Wild rice
Roma tomatoes, mushrooms, strawberries, romaine lettuce, hearts of palm, avocado, asparagus, red onion, red and yellow bell peppers, celery, garlic, bananas, blueberries, ginger, broccoli, snow peas, mushrooms, water chestnuts, green beans, shallots, butternut squash
Low-fat dressing, tomato paste
2 Protein Bars, 2 Recovery Drink, Soy Nuts, Protein powder, sesame seeds, cashews
White wine
----------------------

For me and my happy-slappy singletude, this is about $80 of groceries that ordinarily would be enough food for over a week, not just two days. The rest of the week's menu tacks on, among other items: steak, chicken breast, quinoa, turkey bacon, soy sausage, spinach, grapefruit, pork, tuna, cantaloupe, swordfish...and 24 more eggs.

I moo now.

I abandoned the meal plan quickly, although I used some of the recipes. Fortunately, the program includes a portion control approach, which breaks down each day's meals into blocks of proteins, carbs, dairy, fruits, vegetables, fats, snacks and condiments. There's also a guide to what plan-positive foods fall into those blocks, and and what serving sizes they should be. That worked for me, even though - as the plan clearly warns against - I tended to undereat.

What the portion control guide allows for is small portions all day long; what it doesn't allow for is when someone gets so fed up and bored thinking about what to eat when, she opts for a dinner of edamame, a PowerBar and water with Emergen-C.

Eh. So I don't get it right every time. The next day I open the nutrition plan book and look for a day of food I think I can handle financially, physically and, strange to say, emotionally. Maybe salmon with lemon-dill sauce, asparagus, rice and soup is a dandy dinner, but I have enough PowerBars just in case.