Running on Plenty

Mystery solved!

Well, one of them anyway. Thanks to my friend Twins for decoding the ‘working out like mad and gaining friggin’ weight anyway’ anomaly. According to her, this is a mystifying, but common, problem. She herself just began a new cardio program, and is up as well, despite an eating program that makes me look like the poster child for Fast Food Nation. So I figure if Twins is gaining, then I should be, too.

And then of course, a day later, all the ‘extra’ weight dropped off. I weighed in yesterday morning at 154.50, down 96.50 pounds from my peak and sporting a mere 61.5% of my original figure. As of this moment, I have no more than 12.50 pounds to lose. I am on week 4 of WW maintenance, and I feel great.

People are starting to tell me I’m too skinny. Ha! I do believe there is such a thing, but that is not me. Normal weight for my height and build is 135-167. At 155.50, I’m on the high side of medium. I’m thin, for sure, but I’m not skinny, and I’m certainly not too skinny.

And by the way, I wore the 7-junior jeans to work today, and they were a Smash Hit. These girly pants hug my legs and make me look positively slender. I was even okay about having to leave my shirt untucked to hide the octopus’s head, which kept poking out from the beneath ultra-low waist line.

The greatest thing about life down near the 150 mark, though, is that it’s been really easy to ramp up my exercise program. And it helps that I am in love with the grind. I love running. I love it. I am to a point already where I am racing to get home on workout nights. And I’m forcing myself to take evenings off, because I don’t want to overdose on this very, very good thing.

Running erases every irritant, stressor, and agitation in my life. It’s what bubble baths are to my friend Twins: relaxing, indulgent, and delicious.

Of course the more I run, the more pumped full of endorphins I am and the less I’ll need the running to level me. But hey, I’m still Amy Cranky-Pants, even all doped up on happiness. I can invent agitations and create conflict out of banality.

Earlier this week, I was all ramped up and progesterone-depleted, on Day 18 of my cycle. I’d had a whole day of little irritants-the reception site can’t seem to get the menu right, people were late for meetings all day long, and Subway has apparently replaced their low fat wrap with something that looks like it ought to be housing tamales. So I was in no mood for anything ‘challenging’ when I hit the front door that night. DS was doped up on the ice cream that the Nanny had given him, despite my repeated requests that she not feed him refined sugar, and Howard was in his Cooking Space, where he is neither receptive nor responsive to conversation. Stage Set: Seething Bitch enters left.

I was so overwhelmed with all the inane things from The Day that I snapped at Howard when he asked me when I wanted to eat. Things turbo-torpored down from there. We spent the evening circling each other, and I didn’t even try to talk it out with him, because I could not think of a single thing to say that wasn’t sarcastic or mean.

I took it to work with me the next morning and stewed about it all day long, and then, when I got home, I went downstairs to work out. It wasn’t my scheduled night to exercise, and I did not really feel like digging in. After all, being angry over stupid things is exhausting.

But I did it anyway, and I wound up doing things at a little faster rate, increasing my run time to 90 seconds and I even did a few 2-minute run intervals. I was gulping air big time and my clothes were sticky when I was done, but it was a good workout, and I was glad that I did it.

Then I went upstairs, and as soon as I saw Howard, all my nastiness and nerves vanished. My brain offered up a solution and I smiled for the first time in 24 hours. Me smiling on Day 19! Call the priest, it’s a miracle.

I’m almost angry I didn’t discover running earlier in my life. My coaches always told me that I was too chesty to run, or that they didn’t make sports bras in my size, or that I simply didn’t have the ‘athletic capacity’ for racing—whatever that means. But I can’t be angry about any of it, because my endorphins have wiped out every negative thought from my head. I’m to a point now where, if I start edging toward rage, I want to ride the treadmill.

I know that I need to vary my workouts, because the body is a tricky creature that adapts to challenge more readily than we imagine. After 2 or 3 workouts, it ‘figures out’ how to make things more efficient, which means of course that you burn fewer calories doing it. I have the elliptical on my list of possible purchases, but now I’m wondering if I shouldn’t get a step mill or a stair climber instead. I love the impact of my feet hitting the belt, and of my body bearing its weight as I drag it though the running intervals.

The elliptical at the Y was fun, but it didn’t feel like much of a work out. I could make it so, sure, and it would be better for my joints if I did. But I have to think about whether I want it enough to trade in running on alternate nights. I want to feel the effort I’m making. I wish we had room for one of those mountain-climbing simulators. Now there’s a weight-bearing exercise. Maybe I should just stuff the house full of hard-to-do exercise equipment. I need a big purchase for hitting my goal weight. This might be it. We don’t need any furniture anyway. We’re going to be too busy working out. Fair warning to everyone (who was) planning to stay with us for the wedding: I hope you like sleeping on an incline bench or curled up next to dial-a-dumbbells.

Warm weather also suggests bicycling, and Howard has offered to teach me to rollerblade. I’m pretty sure that skating will be more a resistance workout, as in, my body resisting rolling down a hard surface on round skis, and then resisting getting up after I’ve slammed into the blacktop. But that may allow for enough variance, and while cycling out in the open doesn’t offer as much hard core rewards as the run, I can go for longer periods (I’m still at 30 mins on the treadmill), and I can work on my tan besides.

In the mean time, I’m hungry more often now, but I think it’s a healthy response to the workouts. My hunger is more insistent that it has been historically, and it's demanding the good food. Today I built a salad at work, and I traded out my usual 5 green olives for extra grilled turkey. It was so good that I actually made yummy noises at my desk, and now the guy who sits behind me thinks I like him.

So I learned three things this week: fake weight drops off naturally, running solves all problems, and it’s best to enjoy “decadent” foods in the cafeteria, where moans of pleasure are drowned out by conversation.

Mystery solved.

A the P(avement Pounder)