January 5, 2000 --- 12:36 AM
EST
People on the mailing list
are writing "check-ins" -- to introduce themselves, get
reacquainted after the holidays, plot out their fitness plans, and think
about their progress. I guess everyone is motivated to do some assessing
and think about what they want to do now.
What do I want to do? Or
better yet, what is my assessment?
I want more out of life and I
am hell bent on pursuing it. I want more from everything. I want
more from my inner life, from my off-line writing. I want more from my
friendships and relationships with people. I want more even from my
fitness activities! I feel this strange little thrill because not only
do I want those things, I am getting them! And with each little dose I
get, I get this little high, this little boost, this feeling that I am
leading a life that is rich and textured and not flat and boring. It
simply makes me eager for more.
It's taken me a few months to
kind of step back and see what I want and I've been spending a lot of time
tending to my other needs besides physical. Tending to my head needs
and my spirit needs and my emotion needs. I was getting
bored with taking care of physical needs, fitness needs alone.
I supposed if I had to say it
in one phrase? I was trying to figure out how to integrate myself.
Yesterday I was supposed to
do a walk/jog for a mile. I think I walk/jogged for not-quite two miles. I
was doing it in the neighborhood so I couldn't exactly measure. I was
having a good time looking at the sunset and the kids playing basketball
and then this little girl and boy whizzed by on bikes and I thought,
"Hey! I can do that! Wait, did I go a mile? Jeez, I've done more
than a mile. Well, I feel like biking now!" and I ran home, hopped on
my bike and biked until I ran out of sun. I think it was 3 miles of
biking?
It didn't feel like exercise,
it felt like play. I saw a pick-up baseball game happening out in
the school and I saw a man jogging and a family walking the dog -- Mom,
Dad, Kid and Dog. I smelled someone making dinner. Ham. I felt happy. This
is my neighborhood. This is my community, this is my bike on my road and
this is my time to play and enjoy it all. All is well with the world. Yay!
I love it feeling like play.
I can't wait till this evening when I can play again! To me this is the
ideal thing -- recreational fitness that is fun. I do need to get back to
gym. I miss doing heavy weights -- that was fun and I can't do that
anywhere else but there where the equipment is.
But I don't miss the
mouse-wheel tedium of cardio machines. I am trying to be outside as much
as I can because once it gets to summer the FL heat gets unbearable and
then I will have NO choice in exercise. It will HAVE to be at the gym.
Either that or pass out from heat stroke.
I am trying to make new gym
tapes for myself, and I have been weeding out goofy Xmas food from the
kitchen. Over the holidays I am pretty sure I creeped because my shorts
are feeling a bit snugger. They fit, but they don't feel like they used to
and I know for sure it's not just PMS making me feel that way! But creep
or not, I don't care! The holidays are over, whatever creepage there was
will just go away as I get back to normal. Yay!
Back in fall when I was
feeling cranky and bored and tired I knew it was this emotional phase I
just was going through that I had to work out. But I am NOT a patient
person, and I can't stand feeling weird.
Looking back I wrote, I was
tired of losing to lose. And I still am! I don't want to weigh
anymore or go to gym and be a mouse on a wheel! I can see going to hop on
a treadmill if the day is raining or something. Ok. But I can't stand the
thought of the gym scene being my only outlet for fitness. Staring at
those blank walls, listening to the drone of the machines electrical
humming, listening to my tapes trying to block out the annoying TV
channels they have on. I can take it for a few days here and there. I just
don't want to have to take it day after day after day after day....
When Jen was my fitness buddy
for a few years before she moved, gym wasn't boring because it was our
time to visit and chat and catch up. I have good memories of that. But
once she moved I never found another dedicated friend who was
interested in fitness. Their interests waxed and waned and nobody wanted
to just flat out commit to a gym date daily! So I went solo for a
long while and after a while it's like cabin fever to be looking at those
same walls. Got old!
I make good mixes and it
makes the time pass less slowly to listen to music while at gym. But I
can't take doing that ALL the time, the ONLY thing I do for fitness. I
want so much more than that -- devoting an hour a day to my medicinal dose
of movement.
I don't want it to be a
chore. I don't want it to be like medicine. I want it to be more rewarding
than that! I know when I do it, I keep a food log and pay attention, I get
a reliable, sensible, steady loss. But I will be honest here -- it gets
dull and I lose motivation to keep doing it after having done it for a
long while. So I just stop and switch mindsets and work on maintaining for
a while. I don't see how anyone can lose, lose, lose all the way to their
target weight if they have more than 20 lbs to lose without taking a
break! It just won't work for me. It makes me cranky!
I am sooo glad I took
the rest of fall off and just tried to maintain. I am sooo glad
that I got in touch with a dietitian to check on my nutrition stuff. I am sooo
glad we took the time to find a joint sport and I am sooo glad that
we got the bikes at least, even if we don't have everything we need.
(Secret: besides wanting to
go see dietitian lady to make sure I am doing well eating as a vegan and
not screwing up badly, I am going to consult her about prenatal nutrition!
Not that Paul and I want to start making babies this year, but we figure
finding out about it would be a good idea. Baby negotiations. We are
looking at a new car too because his Talon is eating up money in car
repairs -- only this time when we figure out our needs for this car this
vague sense of "baby" is in there. This baby negotiating is
bizarre, like putting a toe in the water and testing the temperature. What
a strange thing in a relationship! More on this later.)
I want so badly to be better
than Paul at biking. I want so badly for him to want to keep staying a
little ahead of me. Not that I want to get obsessed or be this
professional biker lady. I don't. I just want to be stiffer competition at
SOMETHING! When we rollerblade or play tennis he always just CREAMS me.
It's no fun for him because he wins all the time, and it's no fun for me
because I lose all the time. We spent a long time hunting about trying to
find a sport we both like and can see doing a lot of, but that we both
were more on equal footing.
He's a much faster biker than
me. But because he's a smoker his endurance is the pits -- he can only go
so far before wanting to break. I am not quite as fast, but I have better
endurance and I have stronger legs so I can just .... go.
Indefinitely. If we race, we never know who will win. I LIKE that! I like
it being exciting. I like competing just for the sake of doing it. I like
those hairpin turns and those moments when it's neck and neck and it could
go either way. Cracks me up.
But I also like biking alone
because I can change my route, go somewhere else and see different things
each time. It's entertaining. When I bike at gym I see.....the same four
walls I see when I am on the treadmill, on the elliptical cross-trainer,
the stairclimber. Yuck! When I bike "for real" it's more fun,
it's more exciting to me it feels like play, something that I can just do
for a long time with my body because my mind and senses are also more
involved admiring and doing other things, observing, sensing, breathing.
smelling, hearing sounds, looking.... it's just ....MORE!
When we went hiking Sunday it
was like that too. We just hiked forever. Hours on end. The goal was
looking for the cypress and the side effect was that we were out
exercising. If you had put me on a treadmill and said "OK, now walk
for four hours" I could do it but I'd be one bitchy woman at the end
of it because for four hours I would have been there looking at the same
wall in front of me. Ho hum.
Walking around outdoors for
for hours felt like I was doing something besides just moving my legs. I
was! Didn't even notice the time! Got mad there wasn't MORE time to be out
there when the sun went down.
I was taking photos, soaking
up the scenery, exploring the woods, all sorts of things. Working not just
my body but my heart and my mind an having a wonderful time because
everything was working together so that I could really have a great memory
and an experience. The added bonus is that Paul was there doing the same
thing and when we got home we could discuss.
We'd been mostly silent
thinking our own thoughts while hiking. When we got home was like making a
good time stretch longer because we could eat dinner and exchange thoughts
about what we saw and was the coolest part and what part was awful and
what we wanted to see the next time we hike. It's exciting!
It is simply a more rewarding
kind of fitness for me and it makes that other kind, the monotonous kind,
the kind I used to be OK doing because I had to do something to exercise
with very, very, annoying.
My mind outgrew those four
walls and the bank of machines. I know I had some good workout days at gym
I was excited about and I know there were a lot of hohum kind of days. But
I don't recall having very many actual memory type things about the gym
post-Jen.
I am sure I will continue to
lose weight till I stable out at whatever weight my body thinks it the
ideal. In my head it's like "Yeah! Go body! You go, girl! Do your
thing there keep working and taking us places. Mind! You go! Think about
all these neat hings to think about! Sense! Observe! What do we see? What
do we hear? Emotions, Soul everybody else in here -- how are we doing? Are
we all happy? We are? Awrrrriiiight!"
It's this triumphant glorious
feeling of being... alive.
It's when Paul and I come out
of the grocery store and he looks both ways before cross the street to get
to the car and runs down the aisle as fast as he can and then he jumps
into the buggy squishing all the food and not caring that he will have to
eat smooshed bread on his lunch sandwiches or that he's a grown man riding
a buggy because this is just too much fun!
Sailing the shopping cart all
crazy and making me laugh and making me have to run to chase him to save
him so he won't crash into some poor person's car or he won't topple the
cart over. Sometimes I catch him. Sometimes I try but I miss. Sometimes I
intentionally don't bother catching him and jsut wave and watch him panic
and try to rescue himself.
Wheee!
It's when I am rollerblading
by myself and even though I don't know how to stop very well I skate up a
hill and stand there for a very long time staring at the other end waaaay
down there and I gather my courage and I fliiiiing myself down just to
feel that little thrill of not knowing what will happen. Will I land on my
butt before I even make it down? Will I manage to catch that lampost at
the end so I can spin around it and come to a halt or will I miss catching
it and clonk my head and trip at the end of the curb?
I have fallen many times and
I have caught myself many times and once I zipped down the hill and
executed this graceful twirl and stopped. Ta-daaah! Nobody saw me and I
haven't been able to repeat it. It was a happy accident. Wheeee!
I love to play like that.
I want living my life and
filling it up with good experiences to be on the front burning. Fitness is
a part of it but there so much more I want than just a healthy body. I
don't want just to have it. I want to use it!
I want a healthy body because
it makes living life so much more comfortable and free. To have a healthy
body that can take to the places I want to go and do the things I want to
do. there is no sense in having a healthy body if you aren't going to use
it, and my idea of using it is to really use it, not to be at the
gym just exercising it..
It's like people who wash and
wax the car religiously every Sunday afternoon and never drive it
anywhere good. The groceries, the bank. Hohum. What about the beach
or a wacky trip down the old Route 66? Go to see a rocket launch even
though it's miles from here?
Or the people to cover the
furniture in plastic and never just sit in it really good. Put
your feet up. Jump up and down on the cushions. Heck, bap someone on the
head with he cushions. Build a fortress!
Why have a body if you aren't
going to use it for anything good? Take care of it, feed, it, exercise it,
maintain it. ok. All necessary because nobody wants to die before their
time. But when do you get to use it really good?
Rather than sitting around
maininting our bodies and just not dying, why can't we be using our
bodies in all kinds of ways and be actually living?
Dammit, it's so much more fun!
Yay! :)
~Astrophe
  
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