04/27/2011 We All Fall Off the Boat Sometimes

Waking up this morning, I wasn’t feeling as good as I expected.  I had an appointment at 11 AM with a Chiropractor to help loosen up my shoulder, tweak my knee, and look at my ankle.  So in order to go on a hike I would have had to woken up at 4:30 AM.  I woke up at 9:00 AM.

When I woke up this morning, MOJO was clearly absent from my body.  In fact I think Mojo was replaced with anti-mojo.  I still felt sore, unhappy, and just not in a good place.  These feelings were compounded by my visit to the scale this morning, and the realization that my weight was exactly the same from Sunday.  I understand the scale isn’t going to move every day, but when you are working as hard as I am, you can’t help but expect movement even if it’s a half pound. 

In my attempt to find an endocrinologist, the person Tara had helped me find is no longer in business, he has retired.   So I had to search again on my own, I have found another Doctor in my town, this new Doctor was ranked by a local magazine as one of the DC areas Top Doctors, so I am going to make an appointment with her tomorrow.  I think I would feel better if a professional was monitoring my overall progress, even if it’s simple things like adjusting my diabetes medication. 

I did some work from home, administrative tasks that I’ve been ignoring for more than a week.  I had planned on getting in some cardio but that never happened.  I cleaned up the house a little bit, took the dog for a short walk, and basically killed time until I had to go to my appointment.  For the most part I felt drained all day, just down.  If I ever needed coffee today would have been the day, or maybe some speed or coke.

My visit to the Chiropractor was a bit disappointing.  For my first visit my insurance company will probably pay something crazy as it was an “initial consultation”, and I still paid a $15 copay, yet I saw the “Doctor” for 10 minutes.  His examination of my body was like a drive by, I think if anyone else had been in the room, he could have easily fondled them briefly and taken notes on my chart.  I made another appointment with him for my first “session” next week; he comes highly recommended, and seems to have a very busy practice.  I will reserve my ultimate judgment until next week.

After my Nascar like experience with the “Doctor”, I went to whole foods to buy some much needed groceries.  While in line I marveled at my shopping cart, a month ago it would have been filled with snacks, packaged foods, red meat, pork, bread, cheese, wine, and deserts (oh how I miss Tiramisu).   Today my shopping cart was filled with fruits, vegetables, Greek yogurt, fish, chicken breast, and Mushroom Barely Soup.  I don’t know who this guy is anymore.  Trading fresh pork belly for Cod, and trading ribeyes for 5 oz of chicken breast, unthinkable! 

For lunch I had a Yellowfin Tuna Steak with a salad.  Afterward I had plenty of time before my personal training session at 6:30 pm with Zap to get in some cardio.  I changed to go to the gym, even put on my heart rate monitor, and then proceeded to begin a Bermuda Stretch.  I sat on the couch and went to sleep.  In fact I think it could be classified as a coma.  The only thing that kept waking me up was the temperature of my place, my left hand kept getting cold so I would have to shake it to stay warm which would temporarily wake me up. 

When I woke up it was 3:30 pm.  I had slept for 2 hours, and didn’t feel rested, I felt like an addict recovering from withdrawal syndrome.  To try and get my juices flowing, and end the feeling like I was “jonesing” I took Benny for a walk, and to the dog park.  When I got back home from this outing it was time to go the gym.

My warm up for today’s session with Zap was done on the incline treadmill.  I did my usual increase of 1 level of incline every minute for 15 minutes.  I was able to maintain a speed of 3.1 mph for the entire warm up.  Normally after a warm up I’m charged up to go to work, and really kick some ass.  When I got off the treadmill I was pissed off, and bitchy.  Really bitchy, if my man boobs had more of a robust form, people would have thought I was PMS’ing. 

Of course the days I feel like a whiny pain in the ass are the days we focus on the legs.  We started the session on the squat machine.  With the weight stack set to 260 lbs I did 3 sets of 15 and 1 set of 20.  In the middle of my sets I punched the frame of the machine, and blurted out “I HATE THIS FUCKING MACHINE”.

Next we went into regular squats.  Zap started with 1, 45 lb plate and 1, 25 lb plate.  I tried once and bitched.  So we took off the 25 lb.  I told him that I wanted to do the squat correctly.  So I asked him to do one, to get a visual cue.  I then started squatting getting deeper than I have ever gotten before; I was getting my quads to almost parallel with the ground.  My first set I did 10, bitched about it, and then did 10 more.  On the third set I did 15 reps, and on the fourth set I did 30 reps.  It was an attempt to make up for prior bitchiness. 

We then moved to the leg extension machine, were I did 4 sets of 20 reps with kettle bell swings in-between each set.  I don’t know what the weight was set to for the leg extensions but it was less than I normally push, the swings were done with a 50lb kettle bell.  Following the leg extensions I moved right into leg curls with squats in between holding a 32lb kettle bell. 

The last exercise Zap had me do was straight leg dead lifts.  Again in order to focus on technique and the full range of motion we worked with 135lbs.  The first 2 sets I did 10 reps.  On the third set I did 15 reps, with the final set I tried for 30 but was only able to get to 25. 

At the end of the session I thought about doing Cardio, but again I just didn’t feel like I had the steam. 

This leads me to a question that I’ve been asking myself all day today.  At what point do you just need to give your body a break?  Am I training too hard, should I take a full break, or take a week and reduce my activity to a third of what I’m doing now?  Last Monday after my two day break I felt awesome, and ready to go kick ass, this past Monday I just wasn’t feeling good.  Am I at a point where I just need to grind through and keep pushing, or do I need a short reprieve? 

This is something I am going to wrestle with for the next few days.   I don’t have an answer.