Day 24 - Gymboree!

Whew! Blogger has been down until right about now.

It's probably for the better because I cheated yesterday and went to the gym instead of doing my video. The immediate excuse that pops into my head, the worse of 'em, is that seriously the floor boards I installed a year or two ago have been separating since I've started all this bopping around the living room. It's sort of freaking me out. The other excuse is that I was just sick of working out at home and wanted to take advantage of my pre-paid gym membership and get out of the house for a while. Which I think is fair. This is recovery week, after all, and Kenpo is essentially just a cardio workout, so I did cardio. NO APOLOGIES I DON'T CARE! IDOWHATIWANT!!

Anyway, full disclosure since I switched it up a bit. I didn't warm up or cool down properly, but I did drink recovery gloop afterwards so I am not achy. I ran about 4.5 miles at 6.3, slowing down for a minute every mile to drink some water and follow the "break" system that P90X has (I can take a break while working out instead of always assuming I'm in the middle of a marathon and will be trampled if I stop or more importantly, people will notice I'm human!), so it averaged to about a mile per 10 minutes - keeping it in Zone 2. Surprisingly, my arms felt it the most. Since I've been more aware about how my whole body moves and works towards a collective goal, I paid a lot of attention to what my stomach was doing, my posture, my shoulders, how my arms pumped as I moved my legs, my breathing. My legs really feel like I didn't run at all, but it was maybe the first time I felt my core be more muscular just by being in my body - doing certain core exercises I've been noticing are increasingly easy, but just walking around or hanging out I don't think, "man, my core's really strong today." It was pretty cool to feel those muscles at work, to feel like a strong tree, to feel sturdy and alert.

When I was 19 or so, I took this weird yoga class for a few months. It wasn't Hatha Yoga, it was something more obscure, taught by these two Korean women who would never identify their age - my friend Cassidy and I liked to assume they were in their 80s, even though they looked in their 30s or 40s. Anyway, before taking the yoga class, like when you first signed up for the course, they put you in a room alone and you watched this video about how a tiger moves when it runs, how its stomach moves and how it breathes and how it's a perfect machine. The video went on to tell you how fat and pathetic you are and how you really need to take better care of yourself and you're probably completely packed with poop and don't even know it you disgusting human, so sign up for our yoga course and we'll help a girl out. After a few months (sad, I know, that it took me that long, but I was young and considering the things I'm just figuring out NOW about what I did wrong at that age, three months is pretty impressive), I realized that it was a bit too kooky for me and actually didn't make all that much sense and made me feel worse about myself at the end of the day, rather than better, aside from that feeling of superiority one gets upon leaving a yoga studio into a parking lot of a Shur Save and knowing that you and your fellow yogis are, like, so much healthier because you just massaged your spleen for an hour.

A lot of the yoga was essentially hitting parts of our body, to trigger blood flow or whatever. We'd hit our liver over and over with our flat palms and shout, "I love my liver! Thank you my liver!" This was Cassidy and my favorite part because the Korean women couldn't pronounce the V sound. There was also a lot of pinching and such, and laying on the ground essentially wasting time. We also had at-home exercises, where we had to do 100 breaths each in a series of 4 or 5 positions. Not nearly as fun as basically any other yoga.

The video is really what I wanted to focus on in that tangent, but oh well. During my run last night, which was the first run I've gone on since starting P90X, so the first run in about a month, I felt more like that tiger in the video, every part of my body working towards the goal of moving, fast, towards an object I want to kill. In this case, it was an episode of The Office, which is unfortunate but nothing in life is perfect.

After the run, I went for a swim, which also felt so fantastic. The only time I've been swimming in the past few months has been as a cool down after totally blowing myself out, so just a few laps have gotten me spent. Not only am I in better shape now, but I'm learning more about fitness and also learning to not always take it until I break it (so that when I really need to BRING IT, I can), so I swam 14 laps (which, to be fair, is more like 7 because it's a smaller pool) and could have gone longer but still had grocery shopping to do and it was about 10 at night and who can go to the gym without sitting in the sauna afterwards for about a half hour with the recent issue of Poets and Writers.

While I haven't been keeping to the P90X diet lifestyle, I still went shopping with its principles in mind. I think I am actually making a conscious decision NOT to follow the diet. E.'s mother, who can be a bit of an enabler when it comes to food, made the valid point when she was talking us out of dieting last weekend, that we are young and healthy and not really in need of losing weight so why do that to ourselves, and I think she is right. I believe in healthy eating and have a lot of making up to do in regards to putting the nutrients back into my body in a way that they will stay rather than be flushed out, but there's no need to go nuts because that's no way to live unless we are unhealthy and actually in need of a total overhaul for health reasons. I was still pretty proud of our cart though, as we checked out.