Well, that sure felt good...
I've been hammered at work lately. (Lots of work to do, I'm not drinking on the job!) When I joined the team nearly three years ago I was the junior member of 6 people. Now, I'm the only one who is left on my contract, and my former boss is able to help me out a little, but mainly I'm now doing nearly *everything* for half of the computer systems we handle, instead of doing 1/6 of the work on each of the systems. As such, I haven't been getting out to go climbing much lately -- usually I'm there on Mondays, but Wednesday and Friday I often miss the climbing gym for one reason or another.
Today, I got out of work at the climbing gym. I didn't climb, I didn't have a partner or the strong desire, but I did need to get some exercise in. I'd planned to walk around the neighborhood for an hour or two after work, but because I escaped work at ~9:30 I decided to use the machines instead. 25 minutes on the exercise bike with a faster pacer than I've used in the past, with good results. I gave myself a minute of recovery/stretching/water, and then decided to check out the rowing machine, which I've never used before, but have seen other people on for a minute or two. Ten minutes later I had figured out a nice easy sustainable pace: I did 2km sustaining a pace of 2:16/500m with only a second or two of variation, and I liked the way it felt! And because it uses a fan as the resistance, I had a real nice breeze the whole time, too :-)
Then, the extra fun part. A while back, lilwolfgirl22 posted a video of a guy holding one of those big platter/disc weights by gripping the edge, flipping it up in the air, and catching it by the opposite edge. I gave it a shot once before, perhaps a month ago, and the hardest part was getting the timing on the flip of the weight right. Today, it went great: I did a 35# platter 5x in each hand twice, then a 25# weight ~10x in each hand, and then a 15# weight in each hand for 30-40 seconds. A rather wiry dude doing a little light weight work in the same room looked me up and down (I'm not exactly the poster boy for a rock climbing gym, or any kind of gym!) and asked if I also broke rocks with my bare hands in my spare time, with that kind of grip strength. I laughed and told him that wouldn't be very nice to the rocks! One of the folks that works at the gym was coming through to clean up the equipment (this was just before closing) and heard the exchange, and asked me if I was scaring the members... all in all, it pleased and entertained me a great deal. As I said, I'm not exactly what you expect to see in a gym, whereas most of the people who climb and work out there are really well-muscled and have much less 'insulation' than I do. Getting noticed (in a good way) makes me feel kind of awesome :-)
My food tracking is going beautifully. I've added a few more stats: rolling 30-day averages, and a monthly average so I can see not just the how-it's-going-without-all-the-bumps-and-squiggles, but also have a good visual cue for how things are progressing every period of time. I've been slowly creeping up in how much I eat, corresponding to how much working out I've been doing, and how much I'm capable of doing in cardio, and how my body is changing shape (even if my weight still hasn't budged in 16 months). So while initial estimates of my BMR were around 3100 calories, I'm now thinking that I'm up around 3750 calories a day. (when I started tracking, my average intake was ~1900 a day, now I'm up to about 3000 a day. So 16 months ago I was burning off ~1200 calories a day, and right now I'm down to burning off only about 750 calories a day. My belt continues to need new holes, though, and even when the belt stays steady, the way the rest of the pants fits continues to change!)
So, that's how things are going in my world of health these days. A little rambly, but I don't really have much of a point. I just had a really good evening.
Today, I got out of work at the climbing gym. I didn't climb, I didn't have a partner or the strong desire, but I did need to get some exercise in. I'd planned to walk around the neighborhood for an hour or two after work, but because I escaped work at ~9:30 I decided to use the machines instead. 25 minutes on the exercise bike with a faster pacer than I've used in the past, with good results. I gave myself a minute of recovery/stretching/water, and then decided to check out the rowing machine, which I've never used before, but have seen other people on for a minute or two. Ten minutes later I had figured out a nice easy sustainable pace: I did 2km sustaining a pace of 2:16/500m with only a second or two of variation, and I liked the way it felt! And because it uses a fan as the resistance, I had a real nice breeze the whole time, too :-)
Then, the extra fun part. A while back, lilwolfgirl22 posted a video of a guy holding one of those big platter/disc weights by gripping the edge, flipping it up in the air, and catching it by the opposite edge. I gave it a shot once before, perhaps a month ago, and the hardest part was getting the timing on the flip of the weight right. Today, it went great: I did a 35# platter 5x in each hand twice, then a 25# weight ~10x in each hand, and then a 15# weight in each hand for 30-40 seconds. A rather wiry dude doing a little light weight work in the same room looked me up and down (I'm not exactly the poster boy for a rock climbing gym, or any kind of gym!) and asked if I also broke rocks with my bare hands in my spare time, with that kind of grip strength. I laughed and told him that wouldn't be very nice to the rocks! One of the folks that works at the gym was coming through to clean up the equipment (this was just before closing) and heard the exchange, and asked me if I was scaring the members... all in all, it pleased and entertained me a great deal. As I said, I'm not exactly what you expect to see in a gym, whereas most of the people who climb and work out there are really well-muscled and have much less 'insulation' than I do. Getting noticed (in a good way) makes me feel kind of awesome :-)
My food tracking is going beautifully. I've added a few more stats: rolling 30-day averages, and a monthly average so I can see not just the how-it's-going-without-all-the-bumps-and-squiggles, but also have a good visual cue for how things are progressing every period of time. I've been slowly creeping up in how much I eat, corresponding to how much working out I've been doing, and how much I'm capable of doing in cardio, and how my body is changing shape (even if my weight still hasn't budged in 16 months). So while initial estimates of my BMR were around 3100 calories, I'm now thinking that I'm up around 3750 calories a day. (when I started tracking, my average intake was ~1900 a day, now I'm up to about 3000 a day. So 16 months ago I was burning off ~1200 calories a day, and right now I'm down to burning off only about 750 calories a day. My belt continues to need new holes, though, and even when the belt stays steady, the way the rest of the pants fits continues to change!)
So, that's how things are going in my world of health these days. A little rambly, but I don't really have much of a point. I just had a really good evening.