Month: September 2012

body image · diets · sports nutrition

My Trip to the Bod Pod and the Sports Nutritionist

Tracy I4 Comments

Yesterday was my birthday, so I thought it would be a good idea to really begin this two-year commitment to being my fittest ever by the time I’m fifty with some hard data. I agree with Samantha that weight alone is not a good measure of where things stand with a person health-wise. Neither is BMI, for reasons Samantha has also explained really well. Body composition is a more important thing to know about. That’s the amount of lean body mass and the amount of fat the body is composed of. So with that in mind, I decided to go get the straight goods at the bod pod. It works by air displacement, so you need to change into a speedo-type of swimsuit or a some similarly tight spandex clothing.  Then, after having the science explained in lay terms (quite clearly, but I still can’t convey it to you here. You can check it on the link), you climb into this pod-like thing and sit down.  Then they close the door (there is a window, so that might help you if you are claustrophobic like I am — I had to close my eyes and practice deep breathing) and the test takes about 45 seconds. Partway through there is a knocking sound that you are told about in advance and asked to ignore.  Then they open the door for a few seconds so you can get some fresh air.By this time, I really did need the door to open. There is a panic button, but I honestly feel that if you need the button you will not remember that it’s there. They then close the door and repeat the test. In total, I sat through it three times. Then the results were in. I am officially in the “excess fat” category, meaning that my body fat percentage is between 31-40% (okay, it’s 34.5), with a margin of error of 1% possible.

This was kind of demoralizing, especially on my birthday. But they are not judgmental about it at all. And I am trying not to be. It’s just that I really do a lot of training type things. I weight train, run, cycle, do yoga, tai chi, even the elliptical machine. Every day I include anywhere from 60-120 minutes of activity. I’ve been active like this for at least 6 months and though I do not know whether I started out with an even higher body composition reading, but I would have thought that by now it would at least be in the “moderately lean” category (that’s the next one down from mine, 23-30%). So I have a new goal, which is to get down into the moderately lean category, to 25% body fat.  Having just established this goal today, it’s not clear to me whether this type of goal is just weight loss in disguise (disguised as “fat loss”) and so therefore comes with all the trappings and pitfalls and oppressive features of the regular old weight loss game. I hope not but will monitor that as I go along.

I followed my body composition test with an appointment today with sports nutritionist, Jennifer Broxterman (same one Samantha has mentioned a few times). To prepare for this visit, I tracked my food for three days (two weekdays and a weekend day).  As some of you may know, I am not a big fan of tracking.  What I learned is that I do not in fact eat too much.  I eat the right amount over a day but I just need to spread it out a bit more with shorter periods of not eating.  We also had a bit of a chat about protein, which is always helpful for me as a vegan. I’m going to work with Jennifer’s suggestions over the next three weeks and see I do. They’re quite reasonable even though they involve less chocolate cake and fewer clif bars. If you have not seen a sports nutritionist and have concerns about eating enough of the right kinds of foods to support your training needs, I recommend it. If you’re local (London, Ontario), Jennifer is very good.

I figure it’s realistic to think that by my next birthday I can get down to 25% body fat without losing any lean mass.

diets · sports nutrition

Another perspective on tracking

Sam B10 Comments

My co-blogger Tracy explained why she despises tracking food and doesn’t do it these days. When we first talked about this blog we agreed that it might be fun to share some of our differences in approach to fitness. I offer up my different perspective on tracking not to counter Tracy’s experiences of finding it oppressive but rather to share my own experiences with food/exercise tracking. This isn’t a for/against kind of thing. Rather it’s different experiences of the same phenomena. Unlike my co-blogger, I do track what I eat.  Most days anyway. But I don’t do it because I’m concerned with writing down every morsel I consume with an eye  focused only on eating less and getting smaller. I try to do from the viewpoint of ‘sports nutrition’ not ‘dieting’ though like Tracy I recognize that’s a fine line. I’m much more concerned with seeing that I get enough to eat and that I eat the right foods to support my very active lifestyle.  At different times in my life I’ve tracked different things, usually for my own purposes though I’ve sought feedback from some excellent sports nutritionists over the years. (Right now it’s Jennifer Broxterman but in the past I’ve worked with Tim and Deb at Synergy Wellness and Precision Nutrition’s Krista Scott Dixon .) These days I mostly track with an eye on protein, healthy fats, and veggie intake. I also care about calories and sometimes even count them. But again my focus is usually both on making sure I’m eating enough on my active days and on scaling back when I’m not so active. Hunger has never been a very reliable guide for me.

Here’s another take on why calories matter and why we should track food from one of my favourite fitness blogs Go Kaleo: “Calories DO matter, but most of us can eat a lot more than we think we can if we’re making good food choices and getting regular exercise. Tracking calories is NOT about restriction, and reaching/maintaining a healthy weight is NOT about being hungry and denying ourselves proper nutrition. Quite the contrary, it is about feeding ourselves adequate amounts of nutritious foods that support health, energy and vitality. Here is a tool that will help you determine how many calories your body needs to function properly (I’ve found that the calorie tracking websites, while good for tracking, tend to give a calorie target that is too low for most active people I’ve worked with). Many of you will be surprised at how high the number is. Mine is 3500 a day. Hardly restrictive.”

While I like the idea of listening to my body and eating what I feel like eating but I’m afraid  our natural impulses get it wrong in both directions. Mine do anyway. Our urges to eat were developed in times of feast or famine, when stocking up on high calorie foods was a requirement of survival, so often what we want to eat isn’t good for us and the portions we want to eat are too large. But also I often don’t feel like eating as much as I need to do when I’m training hard.  Without calories you can’t win races, build muscles. or recover  well. So I plan meals, I count grams of protein, and I track. Mostly it feels liberating. Sometimes it feels like a chore.  But in a hectic busy family with lots of meals, snacks, and groceries on the go my food log often serves as a way to remind me that what I eat matters. For me, it’s much more about making sure I take care of myself.

body image · fat

Fat or big: What’s in a name?

Sam B17 Comments

Confession: I’ve got an ambivalent relationship with the label “fat.” I do often claim to be “fit and fat” but I’m never quite sure if “fat” is the word I want. This isn’t because the word makes me ashamed. I’m all about reclaiming labels and I’m a huge fan of some of the blogs that make up the “fatosphere.”

My favourite was Kate Harding’s now defunct Shapely Prose. (If you haven’t read it, it’s worth browsing the archive.) I’m also a tremendous fan of the Healthy at Every Size movement. A terrific recent defense of using the word “fat” is in an essay by Lesley at xojane called, “Fat: Using the Other F Word.” If you want to know why anyone would call themselves “fat,” read Lesley.

Or another favourite, Ragen Chastain, the blogger behind Dances with Fat.

I also recognize that by numbers on the scale/BMI I’m significantly overweight. And I know that some people see me as fat. Others don’t though. I’m most likely to claim the label when some well meaning person within ear shot starts equating being fat with being out of shape, thinking, what exactly, that I’ll agree with them? Sometimes they say “Oh, we don’t mean you. You’re not fat really.” Then I want to remind people that I’m part of the story too.  When we start talking about the statistics, I want in.

So why the ambivalence? Well, I wear size 12 clothes–well within the range of easily available sizes–and I don’t feel particularly fat. The bits of me that have clothes issues relate to muscles and women’s clothing styles: biceps, shoulders, and calves. So I sometimes use the label “fat” but I often feel squeamish about it, as if I don’t really belong in the club.

What’s the alternative? At Aikido the other day I started to notice the vocabulary we have to describe male bodies. We often joke about how much fun it is to throw the “big” guys. Someone commented that I should pay attention to how they roll because they have to do it with more finesse to avoid crashing into the mats. (A mistake I make from time to time. Ouch, sore shoulder.) And the big men are big in different ways. Some are overweight, others are tall, some are extremely muscular such as the power lifter in the club. One of the guys is a Clydesdale weight adventure runner. But there’s no angst in referring to them as “big.”

We have other positive words too. My favourite is “brawny.”  No need for further explanation or apology. They are fun to throw. I’d much rather play Aikido with one of them than with a frail person I’d worry about hurting. Their large bodies feel resilient and strong. Why can’t we feel the same way about big women?

And please don’t get me started on all the cutesy labels women use to avoid the word “fat”: fluffy, chunky, chubby…

So “fat,” I guess. But big suits me better.

By the way, I like “big” in the title of an academic essay on women, sport, and size, for which I was an interview subject. It’s a great article, by Krista Scott Dixon, well worth reading: “Big Girls Don’t Cry: Fitness, Fatness, and the Production of Feminist Knowledge”. Sociology of Sport Journal 25 (2007): 22-47.

Here’s the abstract:  Feminists have produced a number of important critiques of the way in which fat and fit are understood. While fitness provides opportunities for women’s personal and political empowerment, in practice, because fitness is so frequently viewed as a cosmetic project and connected to achieving thinness, such opportunities have generally failed to materialize despite rapid increases in women’s sports and exercise participation. I examine the experiences of larger female athletes in strength and power-based sports to examine how they negotiate their identities as athletes and women, and how they navigate “fitness” and “fatness.”

Photo by Chih Eric Li
(C) CANBERRA PICTORIAL
Book Reviews

Reading some fun books about fitness

Sam B4 Comments

When academics consider doing something–whether that something is to have children, to become vegans, or whatever–one of the first things we do is READ. As a result I’ve been reading a lot of popular books about fitness and I thought I’d share some of my reading adventures on the blog.

  • This summer I read Drop Dead Healthy. In Drop Dead Healthy: One Man’s Humble Quest for Bodily Perfection, AJ Jacobs sets his sights a bit higher than us. He’s aiming not just to be “fittest at fifty” instead his goal is both to make over his body and to become the healthiest person in the world. He’s also starting from a worse starting point than us, I think. He describes himself as “mushy, easily-winded, moderately sickly blob.” It’s fun reading as each month Jacobs takes on a different challege, seeks advice, tries to follow it, and reports on his success.
  • I’m currently reading–about two-third done–Gretchen Reynolds’ The First 20 Minutes: Surprising Science Reveals How We Can: Exercise Better, Train Smarter, Live Longer. Reynolds is the Phys Ed columnist for the New York Times. She’d approve of our ‘fittest at fifty project.’ A recent column is on the benefits of middle age fitness! Lots of neat findings there–yes, sitting is bad and high intensity interval training is good–but also some gloomy news about the body’s ability to preserve its size. I was struck by the studies that show that we often burn the same number of calories whether we exercise or not because or body regulates itself to rest more after physical activity. I think I’ll post a longer review of this book when I’m done.
  • Both books are terrific for browsing and have each chapter’s conclusions repeated at the end, for the lazy readers among us. Jacobs gives a list of the end of the book of the advice he thinks is worth continuing with and why. Reynolds gives the scientific conclusions about exercise research at the end of each chapter.
injury · martial arts · training

Injuries, exercise, and thank God for dogs

Sam B3 Comments

On Saturday I hurt my shoulder at Aikido. I was thrown and I should have rolled out of it. Instead, I went crash/thunk into the mats and even one of tough guys sympathetically grimaced and went “Ouch!” It hurt. I have a pretty good tolerance for pain and I finished the class with just the occasional wincing and shoulder rubbing. I didn’t do any more rolling. Instead, I walked out of the throws and hoped the pain would go away fast. But after a weekend of ice and ibuprofen, it’s still bothering me and I’ve booked an appointment at the sports medicine clinic. It’s odd to go from two workouts a day (often Crossfit and Aikido, sometimes with cycling thrown in) to lounging about the house.

I have a pretty good attitude to sports injuries, I think. Accidents happen. And I wouldn’t choose a life without risk. It would mean giving up too many things I like to do. I think, on balance, I’m better off for all the physical activity that’s part of my life. With Aikido my skill at rolling has helped me a few times now when I’ve fallen on ice. I recommend Aikido to all my women friends who are worried about falling. Aikido is much more useful than just self defense against other people. Learning to fall well is important and if I slip up occasionally and hurt myself, the mats are a lot softer than the pavement. Practice makes perfect. Rolling is, for me, the hardest part of Aikido. Forward rolls don’t come naturally, for me, the way backward rolls do. But I’m trying to be patient and hoping they will, as our teachers say, “come along with time.”

In the meantime, I’m taking a few days off. Just down to walking the dog. I’m no great fan of walking as exercise. I’m a bit of a speed junkie and walking feels slow. I do love walking through big cities and hiking in nature but most of London is too middle of the road for my walking tastes. The weather has also been wet. Luckily, I have a dog. And when you own an energetic dog, you walk. Regularly. Tonight we had a lovely stroll through the neighbourhood with bits of running thrown in since I get antsy when I’m without exercise.  If you need motivation to get out of the house and go for walks,  no matter what the weather, I recommend a dog.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7wV49Q9mpUI]

motivation

Good Days and Not-as-Good Days

Tracy I

Just days ago I posted about a euphoric running experience! That day, my feet felt light, like they were hardly touching the ground. Despite running for more than twice as long, timewise, as I’d ever run before, I broke into a sprint during the last minute. When I made my time, I felt energized, like I could keep going forever. When it started to pour cool rain about midway through my run, it was a welcome, refreshing gift from the sky! I jumped to the ridiculous conclusion that from now on, every run would feel this wonderful. Heck, though I posted about aiming next for 5K, my “more” brain was thinking more along the lines of 10K, half marathons, maybe even…no, I won’t even say it.

In the very few days since then I have learned a humbling lesson: it won’t happen like that every time. I set out again this morning after two days of rest during which I did other things. It was a delightful morning, fall is definitely in the air. Perfect temperature — cool but not cold. My mood and enthusiasm could have been better, but nevermind. An energizing run was just the thing. Today’s goal: 5 minutes of walking, 15 minutes of running, 3 minutes of walking, 10 minutes of running. I didn’t make it for 15 continuous minutes–I needed not one but TWO short breaks (about 30-60 seconds each) to get there. I huffed and puffed. Gone was that skipping-across-air sensation I had on Friday. Instead, my feet felt like lead. Everytime I looked at my watch, hoping to be rewarded with the news that more time had passed than I thought, my estimate of how much time had gone by (and how much still to go) was way off. Where on Friday time flew, this morning, it dragged along with my feet. Part way through, I gave up on the “plan” but continued to walk-run for a good 35 minutes in total, shortening the walk times and lengthening the run times as I went. When I got home and pushed “stop” on Endomondo, I experienced a couple of welcome surprises. First, despite feeling like I was slacking, I covered more ground today than I have before. And second, my fastest time was faster than my fastest time most other days.

Samantha likened exercise to writing and I agree with that. As a writer, I know that some days the words just flow through me and onto the screen, other days, it’s tedious and agonizing. I don’t regard this as a problem to be solved. It’s just the way things are. And so I show up at the keyboard and write anyway, committing to a specific length of time (usually I follow the Pomodoro Technique and write in 25 minute chunks of uninterrupted time). Sometimes the time flies and I feel like I could write forever, occasionally, it’s almost unbearable but I do it anyway. And as I’ve committed to it as a practice, to be done regardless of my mood, those unbearable times have become fewer and fewer. It’s not that I’m always inspired and on fire, but I can usually count in at least a neutral experience. I’m going to start approaching running like that. Just log the time and the distance, and some days I’ll feel like I could run a marathon (well, maybe not a marathon) and other days I’ll feel like I just started out, but most days will be somewhere in between. And, just as in writing, it always feels better to have moved forward, no matter how little (or much), than to have done nothing.

running

I ran 20 minutes in a row and it felt fabulous!

Tracy I3 Comments

I hit my short term running goal this morning and I have to say, this is the first time in a really long time that I have felt myself amazed at my own ability! Back in the early summer when I started running in 2 minute intervals (very easy pace), I could hardly make it the 2 minutes. I kept looking at my watch, wishing it was over, and the 1 minute of walking I did between each 2 minutes of running never seemed long enough. But last week in her comment on the “Fitness ‘Goals’” post, Kimberley recommended the Blue Fin “ease into 5K” app.  I didn’t download the app but I went to the blue fin page and printed off the plan. Since I’ve been building slowly through the summer, I jumped in at week 5.  So when I got to week 6 this week, it seemed like a huge jump to the 9 minutes running-3 minutes walking-9 minutes running (with 5 minutes of brisk walking at either end) that I was supposed to do on Wednesday. But I did it.  Then today, it seemed even more outrageous that the assignment was to do a 5-minute warm-up walk, TWENTY minutes of running, and a 5-minute cool-down walk.  But I figured that the designers of the program knew what they were doing and that if they said so, then I could do it.  And so I set out.  About ten minutes into the running, it started to rain, and then it started to pour. And you know what? It didn’t matter. My steps felt light. My breathing felt even.  It was a cool morning, but by no means cold, and the rain refreshed me at the halfway point. When I have longer times to put in (okay, for me, 20 minutes is super-long), I try not to look at my stopwatch timer too much. It amazed me that by the time I looked at it the first time I was already 9 minutes and 30 seconds into it.  Anyway, long story short, I finished the run, even sprinted for about 30 seconds in the last minute.  I love this feeling of being amazed by my own ability. It may sound like a platitude to say that achieving fitness goals is empowering, and I do believe on the other side of it that it’s easy to tip the balance over to goal-setting as oppressive, but today I experienced that sense of “I CAN DO THIS” and I felt strong and capable.  Next goal will be a distance goal: 5K. Wish me luck! And thanks, Kimberley. Great recommendation.

fitness

What “Counts”?

Tracy I11 Comments

The other day I was going over a list of the different things I do to be “active,” like weight training, hot yoga, Iyengar yoga, some time on bike, and, I added, sometimes I go for a walk. The person I was talking to said, “walking doesn’t count unless you’re really out of shape and just starting out.”

At the other extreme is what I heard when I used to attend Weight Watchers (yes, I too had my stints and am even a lifetime member–that just means that at least once I managed to reach “goal” and stay there for at least six weeks). Of course, they are wild about tracking at Weight Watchers, and you record points for food AND for activity.

And we were told to count everything from yard work to washing windows.  Yes, running and swimming and cycling still counted, but if you were moving at all in a way that you normally wouldn’t, then it counted as activity and you could record points for it.

Now, I don’t track as a rule anyway, but I do have an idea in my head of a minimum amount of activity I’d like to do in a day. Roughly, I like to do at least one weight training or yoga session and at least one cardio type activity like running, riding my bike, spending a bit of time on the elliptical machine (that’s only in a pinch, in bad weather, or when I am into a really good book that I can’t put down–I read War and Peace one summer on a stationary bicycle at the Y).

But what about when I walk to the market and back (that’s a good 30 minutes), or even more, when I walk to work and back (that’s more like 70-80 minutes round trip)? It certainly tires me out, so if feels like it should “count.”

But when I use this kind of thing to replace an actual “session,” I feel like I’m cheating or getting away with something. For example, when I use the bike for commuting, I am sometimes hesitant to count it enough to replace an actual dedicated cardio session (even when endomondo tells me I’ve burned some extraordinary number of calories given the amount of enjoyment I got out of it!).

At WW, the number of activity points you could earn for an activity varied depending on the intensity with which you did the activity. So the more you exerted yourself and worked up a sweat, the more points you could earn for the time you spent doing that activity. This makes some sense.

But that brings me back to gardening. I’m sorry, but no matter how much I was urged to count stuff like that and no matter how much of a sweat I might work up out in the garden, it just doesn’t feel like it counts. Maybe it’s part of an active lifestyle, but it’s not what I think of as a workout.  As an aside, I should add that I enjoy everything I do as a “workout” activity a lot more than I ever liked gardening.

I’m sure there is a middle ground between “everything counts” and “it only counts if it’s a dedicated ‘fitness’ activity.” And I think it’s incredibly important to do things that I love and not to do things where my only reason for doing them is the contribution they might make to my fitness.

Maybe a good basic guideline for what counts is that it counts if it involves physical exertion, it’s not something that you always do (for example, if I walk to work every day, then it isn’t going to count because it’s not extra), it gets your heart rate up, you work up a sweat, and also I think you have to do it for a sustained period of time.

I guess that doesn’t rule out gardening, and maybe it ends up ruling out other things that should count.  But as a basic set of guidelines, it’s not a bad starting point.

body image · fat · fitness · health

Fit, Fat, and What’s Wrong with BMI

Sam B29 Comments

I’d like us to ditch all talk of BMI as a meaningful measure when it comes to individuals. And please don’t say it’s better than weight because it’s just weight + height taken into account. So  insofar as weight is a problematic measure and BMI relies on weight, so too is BMI problematic. I’ve long loved Kate Harding’s project BMI Illustrated over at Shapely Prose. She describes it this way, “I put together a slideshow to demonstrate just how ridiculous the BMI standards are.” This isn’t to deny that BMI talk is useful about populations and big picture trends, it’s just that I think it’s misleading and harmful when it comes to individuals.

Lots of thin people are falsely reassured by their BMI, while lots of people with BMIs  in the overweight/obese categories might be worrying with no good reason. Fit and fat are linked but not in the ways most people think. I worry that lots of fat people don’t exercise because they worry what people will think especially if you exercise and don’t get any smaller. Yet fat and fit people can be very healthy.  “People can be obese yet physically healthy and fit and at no greater risk of heart disease or cancer than normal weight people, say researchers.The key is being “metabolically fit”, meaning no high blood pressure, cholesterol or raised blood sugar, and exercising, according to experts. Looking at data from over 43,000 US people they found that being overweight per se did not pose a big health risk.” reports the BBC.

I love my family doctor who cheered me up immensely when she looked at my chart and said, “This is the part of the visit when, given your weight, I should warn you about the health problems associated with overweight and obesity. However, given that you’ve got low to normal blood pressure, no sugar issues, and the best ratio of good to bad cholesterol we’ve ever seen at this clinic, I can’t in good conscience do that. You’re extremely healthy. Whatever you’re doing, keep doing it.”

A few years ago I tried Weight Watchers–for probably the 6th time in my life, will I never learn?–and I was shocked at their weight range for my height. Weights I haven’t seen since Grade 6. And to give you some perspective they were also weights I never weighed even when at 5’7 I wore size 8 clothing.  The so called “healthy” or “normal” weight range for me has never seemed plausible. I had an interesting experience recently. This summer I was measured in the BodPod at the Fowler Kennedy Sports Medicine Clinic which tells you exactly how much of your body is fat and how much is muscle, bone etc. I was happy to see that to weigh what Weight Watchers thought of as my ideal, I’d be allowed a mere 20 lbs of body fat. I won’t discuss exact weights today but I will tell you that I’m 122 lbs not fat. It’s my goal as part of my ‘fittest at fifty’ plan to improve my ratio of lean body mass. You can read more about the difference between the BMI approach and the lean body mass approach here. I plan to both develop my muscles and lose some body fat. I’d also like to lose pounds in absolute numbers too, mostly though to make running easier on my joints and to make it easier to get up hills faster on the bike! Hill climbing on the bike is all about power to weight ratio and so I’ll never be a climber but I hate to get dropped on hills on a regular basis. According to BMI, I’ll likely always be overweight or obese and I’ve made my peace with that. (I’ll write more about my ambivalence around ‘fat’ as a label for me later.)

Marc Perry notes in Get Lean that according to BMI most American football players count as obese. So too do many Olympic athletes. There is list here of all of the Gold medal athletes from the 2004 Olympics in Athens who count as overweight or obese according to BMI. We need to change our image of what athletes look like. Usually they don’t look like fitness models. See Howard Schatz and Beverly Ornstein: The Different Body Types of Olympic Athletes.

fitness

What does “fitness” mean? A stab at some goals…

Sam B6 Comments

So, I’d like to be the most fit I’ve ever been at 50. Given that I have no high school trophies gathering dust in a box, this seems like a reasonable time to peak. I’m still wondering about how best to measure this though. I had fitness related goals coming up to 40 too but those were all running related. After a couple of stress fractures, I’m not going to be running any long distances. I’m also reluctant, given my history, to use weight as a measure of anything. Losing weight would be great for getting up hills on the bike but I’m more interested in percent bodyfat than just the numbers on a scale. (I’ll talk lots more about that later.) I’d like to focus on weightlifting and Crossfit might be useful there. (They love measuring and recording things.)  I have lots of good data from my 40s–years of resting HR records, lots of 5, 10, and 15 km time trial time on the bike, and even a VO2 max test–but I want this to be fun too.

Here are some of the first thoughts I’ve had about goals:

1.Beginner distance triathlon (I’d like to better my 40 year old time.) I love the Kincardine Women’s Triathlon and this is likely the one I’ll do in 2013 and 2014. Perhaps with my co-blogger. I’m a slow swimmer and a middle of the pack runner but I love the atmosphere at triathlons and it forces me to branch out beyond the bike. Time for some wintertime lane swimming?

2. I’d like to try a new kind of bike racing. Perhaps some cyclocross bike racing. Perhaps Paris-Ancaster?[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iiuwY7r0cQI]

3. There’s a centurium race series that interests me too.

4. On the track, I have flying lap and standing start 500 m times, I’d like to improve as well. These aren’t mine!

5. For running, I have no aspirations beyond 5 km and I’m thinking, mulling over the idea, that what I’d like to be able to do is run 5 km quickly. My running form improves when I go fast–by build and temperament I’m much more a sprinter than an endurance athlete–and I could train for this, I think, without risking injury. I’ve been doing lots of sprinting at Crossfit. My fastest 5 km time in the past was 25 minutes and change.

6. For Aikido, I’d like to test for my next belt. It’s hard to be too goal oriented in martial arts. It’s all about regular practice and being invited to test. But I will prepare each time as if I’m testing and hope quietly, silently, patiently for the invitation.

7.  I’ve started to use a rowing machine at Crossfit and have a 3 km time to best. (9:13 seconds, slow)

8. And still working on some Crossfit goals. Double unders, unassisted pull ups continue to elude me though I’m getting much better at kettlebell swings, burpees, and box jumps.

Hope to have a list of goals soon! Suggestions welcome.