dancezwithkittehz - last minute race training HUZZAH

[dancezwithkittehz]

So. As I come up with my goals for this challenge round I realize DUDE you have a race in 6 weeks and have been super negligent about running at all. Like legit you haven't run in at least 3 weeks. BAD. BAD BAD. MUST TRAIN. So, much as I definitely intend to get strength training in there my primary focus is to make sure I am running at least 2 times a week (ideally 3!)  Aerial and dance and strength training shenanigans will likely still be going on at least 2-3 times a week but I'm not making a goal for it this time!

 

You may notice I am pretty much keeping all my goals from last time because that is HOW I ROLL apparently. For the getting shit done goal if ALL I do is get rid of my desk and set up my air conditioner I will be happy!!!!

 

Also,  I am in a dance show on May 5th/6th/7th so that may totally screw over all my goals for that week depending on how crazy my rehearsal schedule gets. I am just the narrator for our story and I am not dancing so I don't have nearly as much on my plate as normal and there will be times she can run to fix choreo where I won't be needed soooo yeah we will see!

 

 

 

GOAL 1 - RUNNING

 

 

Run 2-3x per week! I am going to be following the Hal Higdon novice 10 miler training here: http://www.halhigdon.com/training/51127/15K-10-mile-Novice-Training-Program

This puts me running 3 days per week. It says Tuesday/Thursday/Saturday but I may move it to Monday/Wednesday/Sunday depending on schedule. If I pull it down to 2 runs per week I will do one during the week and one longer weekend run. Since I have been SUPER SLACK MONSTER, my distances will probably have to be shorter to start than is ideal because yeaaah.

 

GOAL 2 - MACROS

 

Track macros on weekdays for duration of challenge! I am happy with how my macro tracking has been doing. I've been both slimming down in my last remaining belly floof, AND making sure I am getting enough calories for the day but not TOO many calories for the day. I have not been really watching the macro splits as much as I should so that is something I might need to add a specific goal on, but in general my eating is much more on track when I am doing this and it makes me be more cognizant of making sure I remember to eat protein and veggies and not ALL THE CARBS HAHAHAHA.

 

GOAL 3 - JAPANESE

 

 

Study Japanese every day for at least 15 min (at bare minimum this means doing Anki flashcards due for the day.)

I decided to keep this one going! I am making progress! I am finding myself occasionally being able to almost read things! I'm hoping to have more time to do more listening and videos this round (I was able to for MOST of last time but then the beginning of the quarter happened and my time went bye bye!)

 

 

Life Goal: GET SHIT DONE!

 

 

 

GET THE THINGS DONE WOOHOO. I copied over my list from last round and will add to it as I see fit.

My goal is to get ONE of these things on my list done per week.

 

LIST OF LISTYNESS:

 

Gather 1 bag of stuffed animals or clothes for donations or to trash because no one wants it (depending on the stuff!)  I gathered 3 total! Yay!

Move box of books into the closet.

Declutter the damn floor so you can actually move the desk and the AC unit and vacuum and stuff. - partial! water bottle graveyard is gone!

Disassemble your old desk.

Trash/Get rid of old desk.

Move air conditioner to correct spot once desk is gone.

Set up new air conditioner once moved.

Move furniture around in more useful configuration. (Even moving one thing or coming up with some schemes will count for this.)

Come up with better way to organize clothes and make things more accessible (this will also be a big process.)

Deal with water-bottle graveyard in my car -- partially!

Reseal leaking window on the studio appt

DO TAXES/ Do house finances/rental income info spreadsheet for me and brother

Come up with more expanded flea prevention scheme AND enact

Call roofer and general contractor to set up having them come to give me estimates

Obtain home equity loan to pay for roof and contractor jobs.

 

[Liam Learns to Live]

Japanese!! 頑張れ!!!!

 

[Manarelle]

Hey, if a thing works, don't change it. Better that you remember about your race 6 weeks before than 1 week before. You've got this! 

[dancezwithkittehz]

Oh lookie I actually looked at the boards on day 1/ on a Sunday!

 

I am in working on cleaning out my desk today so I can get rid of it and put the AC unit there.  (I put all my weird decorative things into a plastic storage bin, unplugged the old ass computer that isn't being used, and put my back up portable drive into my laptop case.) Baby steps! #progress!

 

Also, I did some strength training yesterday for the first time since surgery (first exercise since surgery really!) YAAAAAAAY. Also I helped my brother's girlfriend move so I carried around lots of heavy things. Yay!

 

I'm going to skip on aerial today since my sinus surgery area still feels weird and pressure-y and not ready for hanging upside down. Sadness! But for the best.

[karinajean]

ACK I am in the same boat but my race is in 4 weeks and it's a 10K, not a 10 miler!!! yo, let's totally keep each other on track here ok?

[raptron]

runrunrunrunrunrun

[dancezwithkittehz]

Yes! Weirdo running assassins accountabilibuddies! Hehehehehe

[BlackTezca]

Woo!!  Go go go! 

[dancezwithkittehz]

This week so far:

 

Running: Run #1 scheduled for tomorrow. I was soooo on top of things and actually got my bag o running clothes together last night to run today! And then I remembered I have lunch plans for today that I made last week. Woops! Tomorrow and Friday looks like the plan! (And then Sunday if I can but I am hiking on Saturday so I am thinking probably a no go and only 2x runs this week.)

 

Macros: On track with scheduling for the week. No I still haven't been paying enough attention to macro break down buuut baby steps. I've been better about protein this week. I may have also eaten an entire bag of beef jerky for my afternoon snack yesterday and I have zero regrets. (Sidenote: I need bulk jerky. This needs to be a thing. 3oz "big" bag is just not enough!)

 

Japanese - So far so good. I totally missed doing these on Sunday/day 1 because fail. Woops. But I did do them on Saturday in spite of helping my brother's girlfriend move and being le tired so go me for that one!

 

Getting shit done - I did lots of desk organization and cleaning on Sunday. I SHOULD be able to have it ready to move on this weekend assuming this weekend isn't a total cluster F of nope (aka depending on how long I have to be at the all day rehearsal on Sunday.) I am happy I have the floor mostly clean around my desk and I'm finding at least temporary homes for stuff on my desk I'll need to use urgently (non urgent stuff is being stored away in bins in the closet etc.)

[dancezwithkittehz]

I ran! It was not a very good run. I'm not sure if it's because my first time running in a while (I suspect this is the reason) but yeah super angry ankle to lower calf muscles after the first 15 minutes in so I turned the rest of it into a walk. Also, my phone decided to random die in the middle of this run walk so I had to cut it short since I had no idea of the time (thank goodness hard restart worked. SO PANIC. Yay for new ish $600 phone not randomly dying for no reason!)

 

I am feeling a lot more stressed this week than I had anticipated. I have a fair number of lines to learn for this show next week, but not THAT many so I'm not sure if this is just residual stressed out-ness from feeling overwhelmed and burnt out most of last year from overbooking myself? Anyway, ugh stress.

[Manarelle]

15 hours ago, dancezwithkittehz said:

I am feeling a lot more stressed this week than I had anticipated. I have a fair number of lines to learn for this show next week, but not THAT many so I'm not sure if this is just residual stressed out-ness from feeling overwhelmed and burnt out most of last year from overbooking myself? Anyway, ugh stress.

 

In my personal opinion, you can also feel stressed due to.... a habit of feeling stressed. If you've typically been stressed by a certain activity in the past, your brain will automatically go there, even if this one is super easy. I'm not saying you don't have cause to be stressed, but the stress habit caught me off guard a number of times. Good luck, grats on the run, and yay for non-dying phones!

[dancezwithkittehz]

3 hours ago, Manarelle said:

 

In my personal opinion, you can also feel stressed due to.... a habit of feeling stressed. If you've typically been stressed by a certain activity in the past, your brain will automatically go there, even if this one is super easy. I'm not saying you don't have cause to be stressed, but the stress habit caught me off guard a number of times. Good luck, grats on the run, and yay for non-dying phones!

 

That's a good point. The last...uhhh lets say 3? 4? shows AKA the last year and a half I have waaaay overbooked myself and taken on rehearsals for pretty much every day of the week, so I think the idea of going into the final 2 weeks of a show does probably trigger and OH GOD OVERWHELMED AAAAAH response for me. Especially last semester when I took on a lot more leadership responsibility on top of the constant rehearsals. It will be OK! And I will get summer off completely! So there's that. 1 week to go ya'll. 1 week!

[sylph]

All the goals! All the running!

[karinajean]

nice job actually running, regardless of how it felt though!!!

 

sorry about the angry calf / ankle. do you have stretching exercises or strengthening exercises that will help?

[dancezwithkittehz]

1 hour ago, karinajean said:

nice job actually running, regardless of how it felt though!!!

 

sorry about the angry calf / ankle. do you have stretching exercises or strengthening exercises that will help?

 

It's not a lack of strength thing, but more of a too much strength but no endurance training I  think? I have calves of doom and really strong ankle/feet muscles/legs in general and running is just WEIRD. I sprint and run around a lot as part of choreography for dance, but the endurance type running without stopping for multiple minutes seems to just be a total shock on the system for me.

 

Stretching might be helpful but I always hear you shouldn't static stretch before running...maybe I should just say fuck it and do it anyway? It's not like I am trying to get amazing PRs or something! Or I need to figure out some dynamic stretches to be done with calves (I suppose the non dynamic ones and just not holding them/ moving in and out flow style could work?)

 

I think doing shorter intervals and only letting myself run for a minute at a time max with a nice long break might be key for me at this point. It's not lack of capacity in the muscles to do the work but that my body needs to adjust to endurance type impact. I know I tend to be like WHEEE RUNNING RUN FOR 5 MIN STRAIGHT and then my legs are like OH F NAH. WE ARE WALKING. Sooo yeah. (I do a good 5-10 min walking warm up before hand and I can walk 10+ miles and my body is totes OK with that/ my fitness level is good.) There must be an APP where I can set intervals to tell me when to run and walk. If I have something telling me what to do it'll be harder to just be like "well I feel like I can keep going...." (Editing to add: couch to 5k apps ramp WAY too slowly. I need one I can custom set intervals!)

 

I'm going to definitely have to balance need to ramp up training because AAAAH race soon, with the fact that my body is not used to this type of work anymore and the ligaments and muscles need time to learn and adapt! I went and read up more on the race again for the specifics and they ask for 10k pace, which seems a lot more feasible than getting up to running 10 MILES/15k in 6 weeks.

 

The race is a relay race. The legs are going to be 4-8 miles each and the team takes turns doing the different legs. I believe we have 6 runners so that = 2 legs each. I'm thinking to prep once we get a bit closer, maybe week 4-ish, I should start doing one double run per week on the weekend. I could even start this sooner on and keep it really minimum like run one half mile early in the day and run one half mile later in the day or something, which I think is really doable. After I rested up for an hour after my too much too soon run and my calves chilled the fuck out I felt like I could run again/legs felt totally back to normal!

[dancezwithkittehz]

Week 1 Wrap Up:

 

Running- Yep! I ran twice out of the 2-3 times I want to run per week. Since the first one was so pathetisad, I decided to go super minimalist with my second run and ran laps around my house. Lolololol. I did 1 minute run, 1 minute walk repetitions for 10 min or so. With rehearsal for half the day on Sunday this fulfilled my need to get in running but also my need to get some damn down time and not actually go outside and deal with the world. Yay compromise! (Also, I think next run outside I am going to try the 1 min run/1 min walk thing as that seemed to be working out OK for my legs. Maybe adjust up to 1 min run 2 min walk if I need to.)

 

Macros- Yep! I tracked the foods on weekdays and was meeting overall calorie totals. After this show is done I need to play around with watching macros more closely. I'm still not sure if I like the ratios I have set. 30% protein, 30% fat, 40% carbs just looks like SO MANY GRAMS of protein! If I'm doing 1 gram per each gram of lean mass it would only be 110g protein whereas 30% protein for total is 172 which sounds ridiculous. o.O. But likewise if I cut it down to 110 where do I decide to make up the calorie deficit from, carbs?

 

Japanese - Mostly yes. There was at least one day I missed and then had to make up for it with extra vocab words the next day. I know I'm letting stress about rehearsal throw off my schedule on a lot of these things but at least I never went more than 1 day off in a row so I consider this success with the suddenly slammed schedule.

 

Get shit done - I did not check off any big items on this but I did more work on decluttering the floor to make it easier to move the AC unit. With the clusterfuck that is this week coming up where I know I will have zero evenings free and not much free time on the weekend because show, I was furiously video gaming and lazing, trying to cling desperately to these last hours of free time! (And it was not enough. Ugh. Much as I love pen and paper RPG days I wish we could have skipped Saturday night so I could have had one evening free and one completely free and unscheduled day to myself!)

[dancezwithkittehz]

My feels today.

 

 

 

But yay survived day 1 of tech! It was...only sort of a disaster? One of our dancers gave himself a concussion on Sunday by running his head into another dancer and he isn't allowed to dance for 2 weeks and the show is this weekend sooo mad dash to find someone to replace him (they asked me, but I'd have to drop the storyteller bit and I have spent SO MUCH TIME learning these lines that I didn't want to do that!) We found someone though so yay, but yeah, this week is going to be crazy and we are only getting started!

 

 

 

[Finisterre]

23 hours ago, dancezwithkittehz said:

Macros- Yep! I tracked the foods on weekdays and was meeting overall calorie totals. After this show is done I need to play around with watching macros more closely. I'm still not sure if I like the ratios I have set. 30% protein, 30% fat, 40% carbs just looks like SO MANY GRAMS of protein! If I'm doing 1 gram per each gram of lean mass it would only be 110g protein whereas 30% protein for total is 172 which sounds ridiculous. o.O. But likewise if I cut it down to 110 where do I decide to make up the calorie deficit from, carbs?

 

This is my exact problem!  The protein just looks so....big.

 

 

Also ankle/calf active warm ups....ankle circles, heel raises, walking on tip toes, duck walks, lunges (a bit)

[karinajean]

OMG! tech sounds very much as pictured. YIKES.

 

I have heard that real runners will do a quick sprint and then stop and stretch, and then run some more. I do some quick toe touches and bendy butt things before running, even if it's "cold" stretching it helps a lot. (note: I am not a real runner.)

[sylph]

On 5/1/2017 at 11:53 AM, dancezwithkittehz said:

 

Macros- Yep! I tracked the foods on weekdays and was meeting overall calorie totals. After this show is done I need to play around with watching macros more closely. I'm still not sure if I like the ratios I have set. 30% protein, 30% fat, 40% carbs just looks like SO MANY GRAMS of protein! If I'm doing 1 gram per each gram of lean mass it would only be 110g protein whereas 30% protein for total is 172 which sounds ridiculous. o.O. But likewise if I cut it down to 110 where do I decide to make up the calorie deficit from, carbs?

 

Woo, protein!

 

It's been a long time since I've messed around with macro math, but the ratio is not so important. 1g/lb lean mass - 1g/lb body wight is a decent range for most people, I think. 1g/lb BW can feel like A LOTTTTT, so IMO, as long is you're in that range, you're probably okay. Unless your a professional body builder/fitness athlete in which case you likely have a coach and a nutritionist. 

 

After that, make sure you're getting ENOUGH fats to support hormone production and all that jazz (unfortunately I do not remember what this number is at all. I will try to find it in my masses of notes on the subject.).

 

After that, enough carbs to keep your energy up and given your level of activity, this is probably a decent number.

 

If you have any room in your calories for the rest of the day, it doesn't matter terribly much which macro fills them, IMO. You may want more carbs for energy or more fats for satiety or more protein because you have the opportunity to go nom some steak...

[dancezwithkittehz]

2 hours ago, sylph said:

Woo, protein!

 

It's been a long time since I've messed around with macro math, but the ratio is not so important. 1g/lb lean mass - 1g/lb body wight is a decent range for most people, I think. 1g/lb BW can feel like A LOTTTTT, so IMO, as long is you're in that range, you're probably okay. Unless your a professional body builder/fitness athlete in which case you likely have a coach and a nutritionist. 

 

After that, make sure you're getting ENOUGH fats to support hormone production and all that jazz (unfortunately I do not remember what this number is at all. I will try to find it in my masses of notes on the subject.).

 

After that, enough carbs to keep your energy up and given your level of activity, this is probably a decent number.

 

If you have any room in your calories for the rest of the day, it doesn't matter terribly much which macro fills them, IMO. You may want more carbs for energy or more fats for satiety or more protein because you have the opportunity to go nom some steak...

 

This is good to hear! I think that means generally I am doing OK. This is more or less what I am thinking, try and make sure I hit the protein number but let the rest of the macros fall as they will in order to get up to the calorie amount I am shooting for. Of course I try not to make that ALL TEH FATS. I do need to get better about eating more veggies/higher quality carbs than pasta and stuff. (I am OK with SOME grains but trying to get myself more towards the lots of veggies!)

 

I went and actually looked at my macros for yesterday which was a pretty typical day for me and I got just over 100g protein so yay. Fat clocked in around 80g and then the rest carbs, and my total calorie number was slightly under my "calorie goal" I set in my MFP. 

[sylph]

15 hours ago, dancezwithkittehz said:

 

This is good to hear! I think that means generally I am doing OK. This is more or less what I am thinking, try and make sure I hit the protein number but let the rest of the macros fall as they will in order to get up to the calorie amount I am shooting for. Of course I try not to make that ALL TEH FATS. I do need to get better about eating more veggies/higher quality carbs than pasta and stuff. (I am OK with SOME grains but trying to get myself more towards the lots of veggies!)

 

I went and actually looked at my macros for yesterday which was a pretty typical day for me and I got just over 100g protein so yay. Fat clocked in around 80g and then the rest carbs, and my total calorie number was slightly under my "calorie goal" I set in my MFP. 

Seems like you're doing fine to me.

[raptron]

Totally agree with everything Sylph said, cause she's a smartie. 

[JediNickD]

Averagers,

Hear my plea!  Without an effort from the Whole team, we are not Wholly Averagers, but Some Averagers.  I'd settle for Mostly Averagers; however, I know we can pull together and be the best team in this Mini!  Ramp up the effort! 

[dancezwithkittehz]

2 hours ago, JediNickD said:

Averagers,

Hear my plea!  Without an effort from the Whole team, we are not Wholly Averagers, but Some Averagers.  I'd settle for Mostly Averagers; however, I know we can pull together and be the best team in this Mini!  Ramp up the effort! 

 

Gah! Sorry I have been so MIA! This week has been crazy busy with rehearsal. I'll try to sneak in some reps!