Nerd Alert!

NEWS FLASH! I’m a nerd. A great, big, Urkel-sized nerd. Well, thanks to my weight loss, I’m not as big a nerd as I used to be, but I’m still a nerd, and I’m proud of it. I don’t consider ‘nerd’ to be a derogatory term – I just think it means that I know what I like and am not afraid to express it, embrace it, learn every little thing I can about it, and share it with others.

Long-time readers know one of the things I nerd out about: charts, graphs and statistics. This weight loss journey I’ve been on has been well documented by all of these things: I have a weight loss chart that I update once a month. I have a running chart (more on this later). I track StairMaster workouts with a chart that I call my Skyscraper Collection (more on this later, too!). Even though I haven’t blogged about it lately, I keep statistics on my workouts in the form of Monthly Progress Reports. Long story short (or is it too late for that?), if I can monitor what I’m doing and how I’m doing it in a fun, interesting way, than I’m all for it.

I find all these charts incredibly beneficial. They provide concrete evidence of my improvement in areas like running and stair climbing, both of which are still rather new to me. They allow easy ways for me to look back at where I’ve been, and help me project where I can go in the future. They assist in the setting of both short-term and long-term goals, whether it’s training for a big race or event, or helping me plan my week so I get in enough workouts. They give me a reason to pause, smile and congratulate myself on a great week or a great workout, and offer the opportunity to immortalize that feeling of pride and accomplishment by creating a permanent record of it. They fuel me. They push me.

There’s a new chart in my life, and I’ve kept it a secret from you for months. I keep it on the wall in my office, and it occurred to me the other day that there’s no reason for it to be a secret anymore. Here’s the story behind this new chart, which I’m going to unveil today.

Workout Update

The last time I wrote about my exercise, a few days ago, I had to give myself a pep talk and remind myself that working out five times a week instead of six was just fine.

Well, here’s the update: It’s now Sunday, the start of a new week, so I can look back at the week that just ended and say, quite definitively, that I did not work out five times last week.

I worked out four times.

And skipping that one additional workout this past week makes me feel like I’m off my game and that I should stop working out altogether for a while. I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. Getting that fourth workout in was a struggle, too. But I did it, and I’m not even sure how.

Outrage at the Outlets

There’s a giant outlet center about an hour outside of town, and the other day, I did a little shopping there. At the top of my list was finding a new pair of shoes, but I ended up going in more than 20 stores and looking at all kinds of stuff (and trying a lot of it on). I didn’t want to spend more than 2 hours shopping, but it ended up being closer to 4. Exhausting.

And I saw something there that really pissed me off.

Wednesday Potpourri

I’ve been a fan of “Jeopardy!” for as long as I can remember. I’ve even taken the test to be a contestant three times (but never passed it - it’s hard!). I learned the word “potpourri” from “Jeopardy!” I knew it as a word that means ‘a little of this and that’ (it’s the catch-all category on “Jeopardy!” that features questions answers on anything and everything) long before I knew it was a collection of dried flowers, fruits, and twigs that grandmothers put in their bathrooms so they smell nice.

I got a bunch of topics to cover in this post, so welcome to Wednesday Potpourri! Let’s get started, shall we?

Idiot Move of the Decade

This post is comin’ at you from the great state of Colorado, where I’m visiting my sister Sarah and her family, and, tomorrow, running the BolderBOULDER 10K race. I arrived the other day, and getting here was a hassle. And I have no one to blame but myself. Because I pulled the idiot move of the decade.

An Unexpected Run

I have a run to add to my Running Chart. The other day, I took my car to the shop to have some work done. Most of it was routine – oil change, tire rotation, and the like. But I also needed them to take a look at my trunk. Something funky was going on. My trunk was going through periods where it wouldn’t open at all. Other times it would only open when I pulled up on it while hitting the trunk button on my keychain. It was getting to be a pain in the ass. I’ve been piling groceries in the backseat for months, afraid that if I put them in the trunk, I’d never get them out again, and the produce would rot into a smelly disgusting mess.

My service advisor is a wonderful woman named Fiona whom I really like and trust. She knows me, knows my car, and takes my calls and puts up with my dumb questions even though she got promoted last year to a big cheese, head honcho management position that doesn’t require her to interact with customers. So when Fiona came back and told me I needed a new trunk actuator, which is the gizmo that actually unlatches the trunk, I bought a new trunk actuator. I wasn’t keen on spending a couple hundred more bucks than I was intending, but I was keen on having a trunk that operated properly.

The other downside to getting a new trunk actuator, besides the cash money, was that I had a few extra hours to kill without a car. My plan for the day had been to go to the gym after leaving the dealership, but having to wait a few extra hours while they installed the actuator messed up my day. The good news was that I was already in my gym clothes. So I made a spur of the moment decision to take advantage of my waiting around time and go for a run.

It’s been a while since I’ve run during the day – most of the time I prefer running at night. The streets are quieter and I don’t have to deal with the hot California sun. But at 11am, with my wallet and phone locked away in Fiona’s desk, I headed out onto the streets and started running. My route, which I made up as I went along:

I look at that route and I think, only if I kept running east on Magnolia for a few more blocks, I’d have a route map in the shape of the state of Oklahoma!

Which, naturally, gets me thinking about what other state shapes I could replicate as running routes. There’d be lots of states that would be easy to recreate: Colorado, Wyoming, Utah, New Mexico… but states like Maryland, West Virginia, Alaska, and my home state of Michigan would be a little trickier.

And if you ever needed more proof that I’m a big ol’ nerd, there it is. You’re welcome.

That route totaled 3.9 miles, and I completed it in 41 minutes. I really wanted to go 45 minutes, but the sun was blindingly bright and hot, and I had to stop. I was sweaty and exhausted, and it didn’t bother me at all that I fell 4 minutes short. I tacked on an extra-long cool-down walk, and was out on the sidewalks for an hour total. Then I returned to the waiting room, drank a liter of water, and watched the local noon news until my car was ready to go.

I just did the math, and figured out that I averaged 5.7 mph on that run, which is pretty good, considering the sun and all. I just added this run to my Running Chart, which you can see here.

Keep it up, David!

Pants Update AND Evening Run

A lot of you read my last post about my favorite pants – hopefully you liked it! I ended the post with a plan for my newly-mended pants: I would wear them around the house, and once confident they weren’t going to rip again, I would venture out of the house and wear them in public.

Last night, I tossed the plan out the window. Screw the plan! I wore the pants out of the house. Without a trial run. I went with my friend Kristy to a party. Kristy’s come up on this blog before – she’s one of my best friends, and an amazing singer/songwriter (check out her website) who has even written a song inspired by this blog. The party was for our friend Haviland’s birthday. Haviland is a really talented actress and singer – she’s been in a Lifetime movie and in big Broadway musicals, and she’s a sweetheart (check out her website).

The pants worked out great. They didn’t rip, they were comfy, it was awesome. Here I am, in the pants, with Kristy (on the left), and Haviland:

I think we’re each looking at something different! I’m also wearing a gingham shirt from H&M, the swazer I bought on my trip to Seattle last summer, and some new kickass shoes that were a Christmas present from my sister. I think I looked pretty good!

MOVIN’ ON…

I decided to go for a run last night. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I was in the mood for a run, because I don’t think that’s true. It was more like I realized that I hadn’t been running in a few weeks, so I should probably go running. Running isn’t my favorite form of exercise in the world (although my first 10K was a completely wonderful experience), but it’s a good form of exercise, and I like having it in my arsenal for days when I don’t feel like going to the gym, and when I’m places where I don’t have access to a gym.

It’s been a month since I’ve updated my Running Chart, although I have gone running once since then: it was on the final morning of my cruise, when I ran a 5K around the track on the ship. But that run was interrupted by a short but torrential downpour (during which I did lunges and jumping jacks under an overhang), and because of the interruption, I wasn’t able to gather all the stats I need for the Running Chart, so I couldn’t add it.

Last night’s run, however, has already been added to the Running Chart. It was a good run – I ran, without stopping, for 47 minutes, and went 4.4 miles during that time. I felt pretty strong, although a touch sluggish (which my average speed of 5.6 MPH confirmed), but that didn’t bother me.

My route:

I learned two new things about my neighborhood on this run:

• Where the closest police station is located! I’ve lived in my place for over two years, and while I frequently see police cruisers patrolling the streets around me, it’s never occurred to me where the precinct was. Now I know! It’s only a couple miles away. The fire station, by the way, is about a block away, right on my street. So I feel pretty safe when I play with all those matches and greasy rags.
• There’s a street I ran down that I never been on before – not on foot, and not even in my car. It seemed like a pleasant enough residential street, but I’m not going to run down it again at night, because there aren’t street lights, and I quickly grew paranoid that I was going to trip on a piece of sidewalk pushed up by tree roots, like I did that one time when I nearly died during a run.

My run was also notable because I jogged past a ton of fast food establishments. Wanna know how many? Me too. Let’s count.

• Del Taco
• Subway
• Baskin Robbins
• KFC
• Donut shop (don’t know the name, but it might just be “Donuts” – or “Donuts & Croissants”)
• Carl’s Jr.
• Denny’s (I know, it’s a diner, not fast food, but I’m including it just because they once had, on their menu, a Mac ‘N Cheese Big Daddy Patty Melt, which has 1,690 calories and 99 grams of fat)
• In-N-Out Burger
• Taco Bell
• another Subway
• Yum Yum Donuts
• Burger King
• Yoshinoya
• McDonald’s
• El Pollo Loco (“The Crazy Chicken” if you no habla espanol)
• Jack In The Box
• Last but not least, three different 7-11s.

That’s an 19-item list right there. A lot of potential temptation! But not for me.

Keep it up, David!

Greetings From Michigan!

I’ve landed in the Great Lakes State – my home state – and I’ll be here through the day after Christmas. Then it’s off to a whole different part of the world… but that’s an announcement for a whole ‘nother day!

My flights today were great. I had a short layover in Phoenix, and, during the Burbank-Phoenix leg, I had a window seat… except that, as you can see in the picture, I got gypped out of a window! From Phoenix-Detroit, I had an aisle seat, which I like because I can stretch a leg into the aisle. Added bonus today: the middle seat next to me was empty, so I could stretch my other leg in that direction!

Tomorrow morning I’m heading to a local gym – the same gym I frequented when I was here in September – and seeing what kind of deal they can cut me for a week. In September, they charged me $25 for 2 weeks, so their 1-week rate must be less than that, right?

I’m hoping the change of fitness-related scenery will provide me a little boost. I’ve been struggling lately to motivate myself to work out. Last week, when I was terribly ill with a cold and/or flu, I ended up missing four days of exercise in a row. I’m not complaining – just an observation. It’s the longest stretch of non-exercise I think I’ve had all year. Plus, two days prior to that little stretch, I had a planned rest day, so, in total, I worked out twice that week, instead of an ideal six times.

Normally when circumstances prohibit me from exercising for a day or two, I start feeling antsy to get back in the gym. Apparently when circumstances prohibit me from exercising for four days straight, I lose all interest in the gym altogether, because that’s how I felt when I got healthy and strong enough to resume exercising. My motivation had disappeared quicker than Santa up the chimney! My first workout back after recuperating was a run. I hadn’t gone running since Thanksgiving Day (when I ran my first 5K with my sister), and at first I felt great. About 15 minutes in, though, my tune had changed, and I couldn’t wait to finish. I had pre-determined my route, so I was nowhere near home by that point, so I kept running, and banned myself from checking the time. All told, I spent 41 minutes on the sidewalks of North Hollywood, and went exactly 4 miles. My route:

I calculated my speed at 5.8 mph (and, yep, I’ve added it to my running chart!). Even though I was fairly miserable by the run’s end, I was happy and proud I stuck it out.

The next day (Monday), I hit the gym for the first time in a week, and had a good workout – 40 minutes of weightlifting and 16 minutes on a bike, plus a little warm-up on the treadmill. Today was a looong travel day – I left my house in California at 5am and walked in my parents’ door at 6pm – so no workout. Tomorrow, it’s gym time. I can’t miss many more workouts – not with all the holiday goodies around!

Keep it up, David!

PS – Wondering why I didn’t weigh myself this morning? It’s because I vowed to not weigh myself again until 2012, as a way to combat a developing obsession with my scale. I found a new hiding spot for my scale, and it’s working like a charm! Find out where it is here.

PPS – Remember the micro red amaranth I purchased last week? A few days ago, I included it in a big kale salad I brought to a dinner party:

The salad was simple and easy (pre-chopped and washed kale, tomatoes, persian cucumbers, micro red amaranth, and bottled nonfat balsamic vinaigrette), and it was a big hit. I thought the amaranth tasted a little like lawn cuttings (in a wheatgrass sorta way, not an off-putting sorta way), but a couple of my friends thought they tasted like beets. Or maybe it was just the color that reminded them of beets!

OK – I’m off. Because of the holidays, my posting schedule may be a little erratic, but I’ll be keeping it up, and so should you!

Thanksgiving 2011

In my last post, I wrote about my Thanksgiving Day exercise – the Louisville Turkey Trot 5K. In this post, I’m going to catch you all up on my Thanksgiving eating.

I established two rules to help guide me through the big Thanksgiving meal, because I was determined to not let the holiday be an excuse for reckless, uncontrolled eating. Like I mentioned in my Thanksgiving Day post, those two rules were:

1. NO SECONDS. I will indulge in a reasonable portion of whatever food I want, but I will not go back for more.
2. I WILL PHOTOGRAPH EVERYTHING I EAT DURING THANKSGIVING DINNER. Those pictures will end up on this blog. This means that you all are going to help me maintain accountability.

How did I do? Well, I technically broke both rules in minor ways, but I’m very proud of my eating. Here are the pictures that I took, in accordance with Rule #2.

First Course – Oyster Soup:

My brother-in-law Justin did the lion’s share of the Thanksgiving cooking, as Thanksgiving is his favorite holiday. It’s a tradition in his family to start Thanksgiving with oyster soup, and now it’s my tradition, too, since I’ve been eating Justin’s Thanksgiving meals for 7 or 8 years now. The soup is not healthy, in any way, shape, or form – it’s basically butter, cream, oysters, and seasoning. It’s really good (with those ingredients, how could it not be?), and I asked for a mini-portion, and only ate about two-thirds of it. Bread was passed around for dunking purposes, but I didn’t take any. Oh, and the nametag leaf was a joint project between me, my sister Laura, and our 3-year-old niece (and goddaughter) Allison. Cute, right?

Main Course:

Most of your Thanksgiving standards: turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing (Justin added pork sausage and dried cranberries to it, and it was amazing), green bean casserole, and sweet potatoes (my sisters made it, and they cut about half the sugar from the recipe). My contribution to the meal was the asparagus, which I sauteed in a little salt, pepper, lemon, and PAM. I limited portions of everything to between around 1/2 – 3/4 cup, ate slowly, and enjoyed everything.

Then I broke Rule #1, and went back for more asparagus, but I’m okay with that, because it was the healthiest option on the table. Round #2 of asparagus:

Third Course – Dessert:

My mom, my sisters and I teamed up and made three pies: 1 apple, and 2 pumpkin. My contribution to the apple pie was carving a little turkey into the upper crust as a steam escape route, and I made the filling for the pumpkin pies. Despite the sweat equity, when we had dessert a few hours later, I decided to skip the pie and eat fruit instead: a banana and an apple. I did have one bite of my sister’s piece of pumpkin pie (and it was delicious), but I didn’t photograph it.

It was a guilt-free day, and thanks to my rules, it wasn’t a stressful one, either! And there was no food coma afterward, no loosening of the belt or struggling to get off the couch because of overwhelming fullness. A successful day!

How was your Thanksgiving? Did you keep your eating under control? Did you exercise?

I woke up on Friday jonesin’ for a workout, so I went for a run. I normally don’t like doing the same workout two days in a row (I had run the day prior in the Turkey Trot 5K), but since I was away from home and without my usual resources, running fit the bill. I ended up doing a big loop around my sister’s neighborhood. My route:

That’s 3.8 miles that I ran in 37.5 minutes, which works out to just a hair over 6 MPH. My quads were really sore towards the end, and it was chilly outside, but it was a good run, and I enjoyed the new scenery. Time to update my Running Chart!

Lastly, after over a week, I’ve think I’m finally at the tail end of whatever it was that caused my sore throat. It’s still itchy and a little painful when I swallow, but I feel 80-90% better and am looking forward to it not being an issue any more. There were a few days, early on, where I was too sick to work out, but my workouts over the past few days have been a huge help, because for those hours, I didn’t think about my throat at all. I only thought about pushing myself in other ways, and that shift in focus proved to be beneficial and a relief.

Keep it up, David!

Open Your Eyes

I’ve been thinking a lot about running this week. There’s no big mystery why – my first 10k race is this weekend, and I’m looking forward to it, and I want to make sure I’m prepared. I went to Universal Studios today to see the course, thanks to my friend Chris who works there and showed me around on a golf cart, and apart from some minor undulations, there’s only 1 big, notable hill that I’ll have to run up (and down).

I’m feeling prepared. Today, my workout started with 5 minutes of warm-up on the arc trainer, then 35 minutes of weightlifting, and I ended it by going for a run. Even though I had an exhausting run the other day, when I kept upping the incline on the treadmill, I wanted to make sure I had completed a practice run on actual hills. So I ran around my old neighborhood in Burbank, which is built on the foothills of the Verdugo Mountains.

My route included a 7-block run up Olive Avenue (my old street), which was uphill the entire time, with an incline that got steeper and steeper. Here’s a view from the top of it. It may look like the street is flat in the foreground and ascends a big hill in the distance, but it’s actually the other way around:

I made it up that 7-block hill. It was tough and I was huffing and puffing, but I did it. Then I wound my way back down, and ended up passing a house that I love and had forgotten about. The house is a great example of storybook architecture, a playful, exaggerated variation of Tudor design with the goal of making the structure look like it came out of a fairy tale (see more pics of storybook design here). It was popular in southern California in the ’20s (Charlie Chaplin was a fan), although I’m not sure when this house was built. It’s not the sort of house I would ever want to live in, as I prefer more modern, less fussy environments, but I love this house because it’s so thoroughly and meticulously designed and maintained. Check out the whimsical details: the walls that weave bricks through rocks, the stucco that looks like it’s applied over stones, and there’s a turret! It’s quite unique, and if I were a little kid and it were a little dilapidated, I’d have no trouble imagining it to be the home of a child-eating witch:

In total, I ran 2.9 miles, in 32 minutes, which averages out to a MPH of 5.4 – and that includes half a block of walking after reaching the top of the hill to catch my breath. Time to update my running chart! My route:

I have a new go-to song on my iPod when I’m running. It’s called “Open Your Eyes,” by Snow Patrol. I got the song off of Sean Willson’s playlist. Sean is a fellow weight loss blogger (check out his blog, Learn Fitness, here) who went from 450 pounds to 250 pounds – incredible! I saw this song on his list, and realized I already had it in my iTunes, but never listened to it, because I’m not a huge Snow Patrol fan. I gave it another listen, and immediately added it to my workout playlist. A big thank-you goes out to Sean.

The vocals aren’t especially uptempo, but it has a dramatic build that I enjoy, and a chord progression that makes me push myself. You may be familiar with it – it was played on a slew of TV shows in 2007 and 2008, including ER and Grey’s Anatomy, and was a campaign song for Barack Obama in 2008.

Here’s the music video. It’s footage from a short French film made in the ’70s, and it’s one singular shot of the streets of Paris taken from a camera mounted to the fender of a car. That the video looks like a runner’s perspective is another reason why I’ve latched onto this song as much as I have! Check it out:

The main chorus of the song is this lyric, which is sung over and over again:

“Tell me that you’ll open your eyes.”

There are plenty of other lyrics that I haven’t bothered to learn, mainly because those seven words have really resonated. I interpret them as a message to myself, a reminder to open my eyes to all the great things that I’ve accomplished. I have a tendency to compound my struggles – if I have a bad day, I start thinking about all the other times, throughout my life, that things haven’t gone my way. When that starts happening, it’s time to open my eyes. I need to remind myself of the positives, because I don’t do it enough. I need to open my eyes to the fact that I’m intelligent, talented, and funny. That what I’ve achieved with my weight loss is extraordinary and life-extending, and that I share it – all of it – on this blog shows courage. That my family and friends love me no matter my weight, and that I have the capacity to recognize and share this love with the people in my life. And, most importantly, I must open my eyes and remind myself that I’m worthy of all of this, and all the good things that will come.

There is so much to see, isn’t there? What is there for you to see? Tell me that you’ll your eyes. And I’ll tell you that I’ll open mine.

Keep it up, David.