Confessions #1

I am a MASSIVE nerd. I think we suspected this already, but come on: who else do you know would decide to chart their menstrual cycle in a spreadsheet and then apply an algorithm to give predictions of the better days to exercise over the course of the weeks in order to draw a graph of this.

An uncle-flipping* GRAPH.

I'm monitoring a lot of things on this project; even I feel that this might be getting a little weird. I was monitoring protein intake, but gave that up really quickly because, well, it was a bit dull, to tell the truth, and the answer to my previous conundrum (am I eating too much protein because I can't eat pulses, nuts, eggs, and fish?) appeared to be: "probably not" (there seems to be little but rough consensus on absolute figures and a huge range of what "right" is, and the potential side effects of too much - anywhere from "nothing" to "meh" to "heart disease" to "OMG crumbling bones!"), apart from beef days, which I already knew.

However, the revelation that my waist-to-hip ratio leaves more to be desired than you might think (though this depends on: time of day measured, muscle tension, and which ratio scales of "you're doomed!" you believe) has me thinking that, despite earlier protestations, maybe I should be measuring calorie intake.

I really don't want to.

1. DULL.
2. Admitting that (again, depending which Doom Scale you believe) I'm closer to "overweight" than I'm comfortable with believing.
3. Painful and difficult.
4. Calorie-counting is what people on a diet do, and I'm not on a diet.

Am I?

And if I was, so what?  Hmm...

My mother was always on some diet or other and miserable about it.  She constantly felt uncomfortable about her weight and some days it seemed she felt like her very skin didn't fit right - she didn't even like her hair (until after it started to grow back after the chemo and we begged her to leave it alone and let it curl naturally).  I only have a few photos of her.  Among other things, my memories are of a slightly overweight, slightly-shorter-than-me woman with a wicked sense of humour, a beautiful voice, and a lot of regrets.  Presumably, at some level, I associate calorie-counting dieting with a fundamental lack of liking for yourself.  Oddly enough, at other levels, I also associate it with a fundamental respect for and desire for a healthy amount of agency for yourself.  I guess it depends on who's doing the dieting, how, and why.  Maybe it's fine for everyone but me. (Seriously?!)

I wonder, of course, if me striving to overcome the screwed-up joints (a clear legacy from a man with a double-jointed digit or two and a woman whose joints constantly pained her, sometimes to a crippling degree), to gain muscle definition, and compensate for my low-movement lifestyle is a symptom of a degree of dissatisfaction with who I am.  I don't think so.  It doesn't feel so much like trying to change myself into something else as uncovering a self I've neglected for a while, whipping the dust-sheet off a still-serviceable piece of old furniture**.

Or I'm protesting too much.

Anyway, for the moment I'm not going to count calories, if for no other reason than that my heart just sinks at the notion, and right now - trying to take something positive from the fact that I'm bleeding too heavily to exercise (like the discovery that I've already got to the point where I miss actually exercising when I can't, and distraction in the form of the creation of a menstrual exercise algorithm, for goodness' sake!) - I can do with all the motivation I can get.  I am, however, going to cut down even further on refined sugar***, and see where that gets me... :)

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* Not swearing is pretty hard, but I'm going to give it a go for this blog, in case certain folk**** are actually reading this.  Hello!

** I'm not that posh - it was just a mental image

*** Oddly, that does sound rather like a diet... {facepalm}

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**** Putative delicate readers who, for some reason, I'm happy to allow to read talk of my menses... curious...

No Man’s Land

Some of will not want to read this. Some of you may well be relieved to see someone else saying this out loud...

Like, I suspect, a fairly large number of people out there putting together and maintaining an exercise regime, I am an adult person with an active pair of ovaries and a uterus and - along with work and other time commitments, current state of health, sleep deprivation and Stuff, I need to factor this state of affairs into my exercise planning.

For example, about a week or so before menstruating, my already floppy joints become even floppier, and more prone to damage. I need to take this into account when, e.g. doing press-ups or weights - I’m liable to injure myself. I’m also going to have to put extra effort into lifting, which may affect my perception of my strength and progress. With the mood-shifts that can come - while these can be combated by exercise, the bad ones can make actually going and doing exercise a harder ask.

I tend to change weight/ shape around this time, with water retention adding to my woes.  Which means that checking to see if I’d lost weight/ the burden of spare Fay on my belly last week was pretty much doomed!  In addition, the urge to stuff carbohydrates (especially sweet, short-chain ones) in my maw is rarely higher than at this time of my cycle. My blood pressure is often higher than normal, and migraines pounce, rounding out already foul and pathetic moods with their very own nauseating magic.

All this can pretty much be accounted for and worked around:

• Don’t give in to your inner grump and overdo the weights.
• Do nudge yourself firmly to a sensible timetable of exercise, no matter how much doleful poetry (seriously, it was dreadful) you compose on your phone on the way to the gym.
• Do stop eating when you’re actually full.  Keep leaning to the high-fibre, lower-refined-sugar snacks.
• Drink even more water.
• Don’t berate yourself - you’re more likely to give up on yourself and sulk in front of the TV with your own personal barrel of fudge.
  Mmmh. Fudge.

I’m annoyed today, but trying to see the bright side of it.  I was due to do the Long Walk Back Home Goal today but luckily I’d already decided to do that on Saturday and do the gym tonight, as usual.

Then last night happened. Pain so intense it was like being continually punched.  It was liked being a teenager again. (Whenever I say this, it’s pretty much short for: A Bad Thing™, by the way.)  It was also, inconveniently, at 4:30am. And yes, I already had a hot water bottle. And yes, I used pretty much every pain management technique I’ve got. And yes, I got up, walked around, drank some water, tried to distract myself, then gave up and took some paracetamol. I found getting up an almighty arseache this morning, and reluctantly decided that, all things considered, I’d be doing myself more harm than good doing Proper Exercise today. Nine hours later, while sad I won’t be doing it, I haven’t changed my mind.

For those of you who may be thinking: wuss - you may well be right. And here’s a thing: I don’t care*. A massive part of this whole project is about trusting my body and the signals I receive from it, learning again how to interpret them properly.  I did quite a lot of exercise yesterday morning, having already started this new phase of the cycle, so I’m not backing away from exercise without trying it.  I’m just not going to stagger to the gym, bleeding heavily and sleep deprived. A mistake in judgement doing too little on one day of the month will do, I reckon, less damage than doing too much.

Remember: I’ve been here before, I’ve exercise-munted and crippled myself more than once.  (*I’m sufficiently self-aware to realise that this is me arguing against one of my own inner daemons; this is, after all, part of what writing this journal is for.  This one is convinced I’ll never be good enough at anything, and tells me that telling me this at every opportunity is for my own good. It’s a dick.)  I’m pretty sure I should pay attention when an organ a similar size to my heart starts shredding itself.  Back in the bad old days of the Massive Tumour™, I would move as little as humanly possible for the first three days of my menstrual cycle. Even now I’m occasionally nervous about hurting myself at such a time.

If I’m still not fit to do it tomorrow, this may become the first session I’ve cancelled since committing to the timetable.  I’m choosing to see this as a learning point rather than failure, as I’ve been at this for less than a month, and I reckon it’s going to take a few of them to establish patterns (as well as achieve some of those pesky goals!).

I am, after all, a scientist at heart as well as a poet...

Shank's Mare - the figures

So, yesterday, the challenge was to walk 2.5 miles continuously, as that's where I'm supposed to be on the graph of now until 6 miles on 23rd March.

As you know, rain paused play but didn't stop it, so what - I hear you putative stats-heads cry - were the final figures?

Glad you asked. I have a tracking app on my phone, courtesy of Google. Unfortunately, I forgot to turn it on until quite late, paused it at the chip shop, then neglected to turn it on  again. Courtesy of Google again, I've tracked our whirligig rain-walking adventures:

Home to Tommy Tucker - 1.2 miles

TT to Waterstones - 1 mile (the bridge was out - we went the long way round)

WS to The Eagle, via Kings and the crazy clock - 0.3 miles

Eagle to The Station - ~1.4 miles because we went a slightly odd way to start with.

That all-important first part was, with standing 10 minute pause, 2.2 miles, which overall took just over an hour. Minus the pause, you have a respectable time and speed, especially considering the rain and the massive standing puddles we had to negotiate at one point, plus shoppers at other points.

I'm pretty pleased with that, I have to say, and particularly grateful to my partner for accompanying me (and suggesting proper shelter, and not complaining about the weather).

My legs are definitely fatigued, and a bit achey, but not devastatingly so. We'll see how they do after tonight's gig, with all the stairs, box-carrying, and standing that needs to take place.

Next weekend I'm in Cardiff. I'll have to see if my dad's up for a 3+ mile walk... :)

Little Victories #2

I'm trying to make a lifestyle change here, and that means changing habits of thought as well as upgrading physical function. This tag will record those little moments of triumph that make me proud.

Today (see previous post) I did a bunch of walking. What you don't know yet is that, halfway to the first designated stop, the heavens opened - lightning flashed, thunder crashed, and everything got pelted with hailstones. At first we huddled under a bus-stop, then my partner said "do you fancy chips?" We sheltered in the chip shop (in my case, chipless) until it eased, then we headed out into the "oh, it's just rain now..."

Despite the fact that I was already soaked and opposite a bus stop, I chose to keep walking. :)

Shank's Mare

Today I met a friend in town. Having walked into town from my house. After a nice sit-down, we walked to the pub, and then to the station to see him off back to That London.

ALL OF THE WALKING.

Right now I am very happy about this . Join me tomorrow when we find out how my knees feel about it... (I have a tentative prediction of "not quite as chuffed".)

Still. Tomorrow, when I get my Google on, I'll know what my walking distance looks like now.

Progress

Not quite sure what to say here. Have avoided this so far, but this is one of the stated reasons for having the blog - a record of effects, so have at it. Behold a mixture of facts and feels.

Timetable

I have one now, and so far I haven't cheated. It's only been a couple of days now, mind. Basically, I have to treat exercise (physio, strength-builders like press-ups, etc., and gym) as an entity like gigs or arts admin meetings or dates or stuff, only the main difference being that I can move them without asking anyone else. And that's move, not cancel. I try to make sure there's at least one rest day per week in the mix (and some of the other days are physio-only).

Let's see how that goes. I've learned from tonight's experience that I can do a day's work, go to the gym for a short but thorough workout, and drive a 100-mile trip round a gig without dying. I wonder what tomorrow will bring!

Physio

This is going well, and I'm building back in some of the weird micro-muscle exercises I can do in my chair at work as well. Doing 15-20 mins of mat-physio in the morning does seem to make me feel more energised. It does, however, need to be timetabled with real discipline, mind...

I'm up to the proper number of reps for everything, and it's neither a burden nor a literal pain at the moment.

Gym

Gymnasia are weird places, no? What the...? Yeah. So re-calibrating my weirdness scale again to fit gyms in is proving interesting.

I've worked out how to make the stationary bikes do stuff that works for me and doesn't make me frustratedly confused. This is good. I'm up to a whopping 13.5 minutes (oooh) on each type of bike (beginning and end of the workout) at around level 8 (whatever the hell that means), and the time doesn't drag.

Much. I did have to start reading on my phone for the final 5 minutes of the second set. I should look out my Kindle - that worked well last time around, in the gym I understood.

This gym is shiny and doesn't have thick, slightly manky mats on which I could stretch and do floor exercises like the old one. It also has an alarming number (one so far, but where are the rest?!) of work colleagues in it. And there's a hot tub on a fire escape. I don't even...

Okay. Right. I'm using 2kg weights for the free weight exercises - up to 20 reps for the "easy" ones, and 15 for the "people with a screwed-up shoulder probably shouldn't... fine..." ones. I'm doing a mix of biceps and triceps and I have to try hard not to smile encouragingly/ snigger at the other people with (much bigger) weights. (Listen, if you look at me out of the corner of your eye while mashing big lumps of metal around and grunting, I have to assume that you want me to pay attention and validate you somehow.)

I'll switch up weight and down reps when 15 and 20 get easy. They have 2.5kg weights. They're barely used...

My arms don't burn like they did at first; the final five reps of any set are a lot less Sisyphean than they were last week.

Rowing machines are fun! :D Especially when you remember that time your partner taught you how to row properly on one of these things. 800+m in 5 mins? Something like that... More next week, and to think I only got on it because someone was using the chest press.

Up to 14kg on the chest press - two sets of 15-ish reps (second set always shorter than the first). Starting to come to the conclusion that either all chest press machines are wonky in the  same way, or I actually have one arm shorter than the other.

Strength exercises

Up to 20 on press-ups, 15 on leg-raises (old injury I'm being careful of), and 60s on front plank (get in!). I do four sets and the reps/ holds definitely vary after the first one.

How does it make you feel?

Chuffed, really. My top pulse rate appears to have reduced on the bikes, the weight reps are solid, I haven't injured myself yet, and it feels like progress.

And how does that make you feeeel?

I definitely feel more confident and more present in my body (as opposed to disconnected/ avoiding sensations from). I'm not exactly free of pain at the moment, but I seem to be less bothered about it - it's just information.

I tend to start to groan when I pull myself up from sitting, then realise that's not that painful. In fact I've only just realised this week how much I move through the world as though in expectation of pain. It would be good to stop that.

Dietary Stuff

Drinking more water is brilliant! And it turns out I was already pretty good at getting five a day. But pushing it more is good. Eating more raw vegs always gives me this weird sensation of a light belly (no, not hungry!) after a few days of putting the effort in.

And I'm therefore eating fewer snacks as there's no room for them.

Right. I'm.crashing. See you soon!

Meet my friend: Pain

Someone I know has the following advice for exercising, especially when you're getting started and don't know your limits: Stop comes before ow.

It's good advice, as it goes, but imprecise.  Ow comes at different points for different people and, in this case, "Ow" is not the beginning of pain, but a tenuously-defined point after the pain starts and before you're ripping yourself to shreds.

I have a high pain threshold, in general.  This is partly because I'm used to it as a constant (q.v. crappy joints), and partly because, when things are bad and I'm whingeing, I have some historical doozies to call back on to say: it's not as painful as [insert horrific incident], just put it away in the pain cupboard.

This management technique is good for pain when you know it'll end at some point, e.g. simple injury, recovering from surgery, headache when the source is known, migraine (although that's only minimally good when your headspace for putting pain is filled with orgulous, rolling, foggy banks of sickening pain).  However, it's a bit less useful for when the pain is scary because its source (and duration) is unknown. Then it becomes as tiring as someone constantly jumping out at random and shouting "Boo!" - you become hyper-vigilant to the point of paranoia, cringing before it even hits...

One of the things that's wrong with my poor knees is, apparently, some kind of hyperalgaesia.  Something went wrong with my ability to work out what's an ignorable amount of pain in that area and it all feels frightening and alien.  When I haven't done my exercises for a while (or eat the wrong food, or do too much standing without preparation), I go back to the place where I can't sleep for the discomfort, which sucks for two reasons, one of which being that sleep deprivation makes you more sensitive to pain.

One of the two useful things the NHS physio gave me (the other being insoles to correct pronation) was advice to touch my knees (and the areas around them) as much as possible with different kinds of pressures and textures, to basically bring up their sensation threshold.  Resting them and avoiding using them was only making them flabby and over-sensitive, basically.  Imagine that puffy rawness of paler skin out from under a plaster and breathing air for the first time in ages.  Like that.

Which brings us on to the key bit - the NHS physios told me to "do [these gentle exercises] and stop when it hurts."  The private physio told me to "do these more difficult exercises and push through the pain - your body has expectations and you need to shift them."  [This last is a contraction and paraphrase.]

Now, that's not to say that she was keen on me running around and breaking myself.  This is the woman who laughed heartily at me coming in with a busted neck, the pain of which had seemed to come on with a sneeze, but had actually been caused, she worked out, by me trying standing on my head the previous evening.  I am too heavy to stand on my head with the current parlous state of my muscles.  In this case, stop should have come way before ow.

Until very recently, I've been neglecting to stretch out properly after exercising.  I'm not entirely sure why this is.  Sometimes I'm rushing for a bus to get home, but... well... maybe I'm not taking it all seriously enough.  (Also, when the endorphins are rushing around, you think you're fine and don't need to stretch, just change, go home, and eat ALL THE PASTA.)  So I've been hurting like a bastard the following day, and that's been my measure of "congratulations: you did exercise". I used to call this "the smug fire of self-induced pain".

Yeah, not so clever.

Last night I achieved a mini-goal: front (as opposed to side-; I'm building up to that) plank held for 60 seconds.  I squeaked in victory and collapsed on the mat, all glowy.  Last night, after upping my sets to 4 instead of 3, I stretched properly, and today: yes, I feel achey, but to the degree that feels like "good workout last night" not the "holy crap, my left shoulder's so tight I've got pins and needles running down my arm" sensation I've been getting that makes me think I should see my physio.

Turns out Pain's one of those friends - you don't seek him out because he can be very draining company but, if he happens to come with the territory, you should neither avoid nor ignore him - he always speaks the truth, even though he sometimes exaggerates. Pain's part of healing, after all, and I need to break my muscles just enough to build them through healing, and pain's part of that.

Conversely, Injury's a wazzock and should be avoided if at all possible.

I guess what I'm saying is: test your limits constantly by artfully nudging beyond the ones you want to change. And have a map for what the steps are between the landmarks.  Pain is part of this - listen to him and he'll be a good friend in unfamiliar territory. And, for goodness' sake, save painkillers for emergencies!