Made it to Barrie!

It's hard to believe that January is already done and over with. It seems like only yesterday that I was setting goals for the year.

Well, we are one month in to 2015 so it's time for my first checkin of the year.

Running
So far, running has been going well. I am not training for anything specific at the moment but I'm keeping my mileage up at a point where I could slip into half marathon training without too much difficulty.

In January I ran 12 times and covered 104k in 12 1/2 hours. I like months where I manage to run 100+k. There is something fun about putting that kind of distance on my shoes. Particularly in the cold dark months of a January in Canada.

Cycling
Cycling has also been going well. I have been much more consistent on the bike in the winter months than I was last summer.

I managed to get 6 rides in and covered a total of 106k in 5 1/4 hours.

Corefit and Tabata
I just finished my fifth straight month of CoreFit and Tabata classes and it's quite clear that these classes are a great addition to my workout schedule. I'm much stronger than I was and I do believe they have made a difference on my runs.

I did 6 classes in January - I missed one due to life and I missed a second one that was cancelled due to snow. I did work out at home that night but didn't count it simply because it was nowhere near as intense as it would have been had I had someone telling me what to do.

Swimming
Swimming has been good in the sense that I actually made it to the pool which is more than I could say in November and December. But I'm still not feeling any desire to get back in there and must force myself. I managed to swim three times for a total distance of 6.7k.

Nothing to brag about to be sure but a goal to try to beat in February I guess.

So how were things overall?

One month in and I have covered 216km.

My goal for this year was to walk, bike, swim and run the distance from our front door to Regina, Saskatchewan which is a grand total of 2747k.

My 216k takes my from our front door to the other side of Barrie, Ontario.

Slow and steady folks, slow and steady.

Calories Burned and Other Witchcraft and Wizardry

I've learned a lot in the 2 weeks that I've been using My Fitness Pal.

I've learned that I was eating way too much food and that what I thought was a serving is actually enough to feed both Doug and I.

I learned that, if I eat healthy balanced meals and snacks, I can eat a more reasonable amount without feeling any more hungry. In fact the only difference is that I don't feel that heavy full feeling that I felt after most meals.

I've learned that eating 3 squares of chocolate as a treat after dinner tastes more delicious than eating 6 of them. I think our taste buds turn down a notch or two after the first few bites of food so I'm learning to take a bit of something, eat it, enjoy it, and then decided if I need a bit more.

In the last two days, I've also learned that calculating the amount of calories burned during exercise is less of a science and more of a combination of witchcraft and ruby-slippered heel clicking.

+ 

= 

Calories burned

Since day one, I had been entering my runs and my bike rides into My Fitness Pal and it would immediately spit out a number of calories burned which it then added to my daily calorie total. All I had to do was pick the activity from their list, enter the time I spent doing it and voilà!

But then I tried to enter my CoreFit class on Tuesday night and the wheels fell off the cart. CoreFit is not a cardio exercise and it's not a strength exercise. It's both. And it's not on the list of activities that My Fitness Pal has for us to pick from. So I started looking at how calories burned are actually calculated and one website brought me to another one and soon enough I realized that it's just plain overwhelming to try to do anything other than estimate.

I learned that having a sense of my average heart rate over the course of the activity is helpful so, for research purposes, I put on my heart rate monitor for my Thursday morning bike ride. My average heart rate over the 51-minute ride turned out to be 121 beats per minute (bpm).

I entered the workout into My Fitness Pal (without the heart rate because you can't actually put that in) and it said I burned 498 calories.

I uploaded the workout into Training Peaks (with heart rate) and it said that I burned 602 calories.

I then tried plugging my age, weight, heart rate and time spent cycling into a formula that I found referenced at a variety of online sources and it said that I burned 333 calories.

One workout, three very different numbers.

For fun, I decided to wear my heart rate monitor to Tabata class on Thursday night. It's another workout that isn't easily plugged into My Fitness Pal. After class I uploaded the data into Training Peaks and learned that my max heart rate was 152bpm and my average was 116bpm.

Training Peaks said that my calorie burn over the 42 minute class was 319.
My formula said that it was 252.

Those two were a little closer this time.

I'll be wearing my heart rate monitor on Saturday's run and am very interested to see what that tells me.

My guess is that I will have to take any number given with a grain of salt, eat more food on days when I exercise more but not worry too much about the details.
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P.S. the formula I was using for anyone who is interested is:

C = [(A x 0.074) - (W x 0.05741) + (H x 0.4472) - 20.4022)} x T / 4.184

C = calories burned
A = age
W = weight (in pounds)
H = average heart rate in beats per minute
T = time in minutes

Note: this formula was for females. There is a slightly different one for males that you can easily find by Googling if you want it.

P.P.S. I also learned that I apparently have a crazy low resting heart rate. I was walking around the house and my heart rate hovered around 65-75. I sat down and, within 15 seconds, was down to 48 beats per minute. I Googled that too and discovered that I'm supposed to tell my doctor if my heart rate is consistently below 60. So I sighed, stopped Googling and went to Tabata.

Not So Tough Anymore

The human body is amazing.

Really.

I have been doing CoreFit and Tabata classes now for 11 weeks. Technically 9 since I missed two weeks due to travel and being sick.

The first week of CoreFit and Tabata was shocking in its difficulty. I barely survived the class and then I limped around for days afterwards as my muscles protested. The next few weeks were still pretty brutal but a little less so because at least I knew what to expect.

I missed two weeks and then the first week back was pretty tough.

The last two weeks though, something happened at Thursday evening's Tabata classes. I actually surprised myself by thinking 'this really isn't that hard anymore'. In fact, last week in the middle of the class I thought 'this really isn't challenging enough'.

I can hold the side planks. I can lift the weights. I can lift the weights while holding the planks. And at the end of it all I can drive home, have dinner, shower and not feel an overwhelming desire to collapse into bed.

I love these classes and I think they have really helped me get stronger in ways that my other workouts were not able to.

But I no longer walk into the class hoping to survive. I now walk into the class excited for a good workout followed by an evening luxuriating on the couch with a good book.

It's amazing what the human body can get used to isn't it?

What about Tuesday's CoreFit you ask? Well that class is another kinda beast entirely and still leaves me shaky-limbed and exhausted at the end. Gonna be a few more weeks yet before I write about how 'easy' CoreFit is.

October Wrap Up

It's been November for three days already. Before October fades too quickly from my memory, I figure I had better fess up report on how the month was fitness-wise.

What is the opposite of stellar? Whatever word pops into mind is probably a good one for describing how the month went.

Out of 31 days, I only worked out on 12 of them. The other 19 days I did absolutely nothing. At least nothing particularly physical.

I did not swim once.

I did not cycle once (inside or outside)

I ran 6 times for a total of 34 kilometres. It took me 3 hours and 50 minutes.

I was able to squeeze in 12 hours of golf, walking a total of 30km.

I did 2 CoreFit classes and 3 Tabata ones. So five hours of weights and core workouts.

I could blame it on my cold and my never-ending cough.

I could complain about the struggle to regain the fitness level I had back in September when I was running 20k sans problème.

Instead, I'll look at it as a much-needed opportunity to rest my body a bit after a summer of tough workouts.

We're three days into November and I've already got a run in and a hill workout on my bike (indoors).

Looks like the rest period is slowly coming to an end.

Tabata

Ever heard of Tabata?

I had no idea what it was. All I knew was that the Thursday night CoreFit class was a Tabata class.

Tabata, as it turns out, is like CoreFit on speed.

The class is broken up into 4-minute segments. Before each segment we are explained the four things we are about to do.

Each segment seems to have a cardio thing (like jumping jacks), an arm weight thing (like bicep curls), a core thing (like side plank) and an ab thing (like lie on your back and then raise and lower your legs). You do each activity for 20 seconds and then immediately move on to the next and the next. When all four are done you immediately repeat the entire set of four. 

The entire segment takes 4 minutes. 

Then you sit panting on the mat while the instructor quickly explains the next four moves. Repeat this until you have finished 8 complete segments. All the while there is a recording of a guy counting down the 20 second sets and playing wacky music in between. 

It's fun. It's fast. It's hard. And it's manageable because, no matter how hard something was, you only had to do it for 20 seconds.

I laughed a few times because all the other ladies were sore from Tuesday as well and every once in a while a collective groan could be heard as the move we did used one of the sorer muscle groups. It's bizarre how comforting it is to share pain with others. 

I crawled home again on Thursday night hoping my body would have enough time to recover before my 20k run on Saturday morning. 

I have to say that I am impressed with the classes and pleasantly surprised at how the first week went. It will be interesting to see how far I get after 15 weeks of this. At this rate I'll be able to bench press a car by Christmas.

A small car mind you.